Entropy production in the mesoscopic-leads formulation of quantum thermodynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the entropy production of systems strongly coupled to thermal baths is a core problem of both quantum thermodynamics and mesoscopic physics. While many techniques exist to accurately study entropy production in such systems, they typically require a microscopic description of the baths, which can become numerically intractable to study for large systems. Alternatively an open-systems approach can be employed with all the nuances associated with various levels of approximation. Recently, the mesoscopic leads approach has emerged as a powerful method for studying such quantum systems strongly coupled to multiple thermal baths. In this method, a set of discretized lead modes, each locally damped, provide a Markovian embedding. Here we show that this method proves extremely useful to describe entropy production of a strongly coupled open quantum system. We show numerically, for both noninteracting and interacting setups, that a system coupled to a single bath exhibits a thermal fixed point at the level of the embedding. This allows us to use various results from the thermodynamics of quantum dynamical semigroups to infer the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the strongly coupled, non-Markovian central systems. In particular, we show that the entropy production in the transient regime recovers the well-established microscopic definitions of entropy production with a correction that can be computed explicitly for both the single- and multiple-lead cases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".