Abstract
A recent work [A. Lapolla and A. Godec, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 110602 (2020)] showed that among a pair of thermodynamically equidistant quenches from a colder and a hotter initial state at a fixed ambient temperature, the relaxation from the colder initial state (uphill relaxation) is always faster, for dynamics close to stable minima. Here we show that this is not generically the case for open quantum systems with two or three energy levels. We find that both faster uphill and faster downhill relaxation and symmetric thermal relaxation can be observed in equidistant quenches, depending on the transition rates and the choice of the distance measure used. Furthermore, we obtain a phase diagram in the parameter space for the three-level system corresponding to different thermalization behaviors.
Highlights
Thermal relaxation is one of the simplest scenarios leading to nonequilibrium dynamics [1]
We obtain a phase diagram in the parameter space for the three-level system corresponding to different thermalization behaviors
We analyzed the properties of equidistant quenches in two- and three-level systems in contact with a thermal reservoir
Summary
Thermal relaxation is one of the simplest scenarios leading to nonequilibrium dynamics [1]. We check if the asymmetry in equidistant quenches and faster uphill relaxation can be seen in two- and threelevel quantum systems in contact with a thermal reservoir, whose dynamics is described using Lindblad quantum master equations [19,20,21,22,23] We consider both KL divergence and trace distance measures. For two-level systems, we consider generic initial states with coherences as well We find that both faster uphill and faster downhill relaxation, as well as symmetric thermal relaxation, can be observed in equidistant quenches, depending on both the transition rates as well as the distance measure used.
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