Dissipation and entropy production in open quantum systems

Abstract

A microscopic description of an open system is generally expressed by the Hamiltonian of the form: Htot = Hsys + Henviron + Hsys−environ. We developed a microscopic theory of entropy and derived a general formula, so-called "entropy-Hamiltonian relation" (EHR), that connects the entropy of the system to the interaction Hamiltonian represented by Hsys-environ for a nonequilibrium open quantum system. To derive the EHR formula, we mapped the open quantum system to the representation space of the Liouville-space formulation or thermo field dynamics (TFD), and thus worked on the representation space ℒ := ℋ ⊗ , where ℋ denotes the ordinary Hilbert space while the tilde Hilbert space conjugates to ℋ. We show that the natural transformation (mapping) of nonequilibrium open quantum systems is accomplished within the theoretical structure of TFD. By using the obtained EHR formula, we also derived the equation of motion for the distribution function of the system. We demonstrated that by knowing the microscopic description of the interaction, namely, the specific form of Hsys−environ on the representation space ℒ, the EHR formulas enable us to evaluate the entropy of the system and to gain some information about entropy for nonequilibrium open quantum systems.