Informational steady states and conditional entropy production in continuously monitored systems: The case of Gaussian systems

Abstract

The act of measuring a system has profound consequences of dynamical and thermodynamic nature. In particular, the degree of irreversibility ensuing from a non-equilibrium process is strongly affected by measurements aimed at acquiring information on the state of a system of interest: the conditional and unconditional entropy production, which quantify the degree of irreversibility of the open system's dynamics, are related to each other by clearly interpreted informational quantities. Building on a recently proposed collisional-model framework [G. T. Landi {\it et al.}, arXiv:2103.06247], we investigate the case of continuous-variable information carriers prepared in Gaussian states and undergoing Gaussian processes. We build up a toolbox that fully characterizes the thermodynamics of continuously measured non-equilibrium Gaussian systems and processes, illustrating how the instruments hereby introduced provide key insight into recent experiments on mesoscopic quantum systems [Phys. Rev. Lett, {\bf 125}, 080601 (2020)].