Abstract
The relation between the thermodynamic entropy production and non-Markovian evolutions is matter of current research. Here, we study the behavior of the stochastic entropy production in open quantum systems undergoing unital non-Markovian dynamics. In particular, for the family of Pauli channels we show that in some specific time intervals both the average entropy production and the variance can decrease, provided that the quantum dynamics fails to be P-divisible. Although the dynamics of the system is overall irreversible, our result may be interpreted as a transient tendency towards reversibility, described as a delta peaked distribution of entropy production around zero. Finally, we also provide analytical bounds on the parameters in the generator giving rise to the quantum system dynamics, so as to ensure irreversibility mitigation of the corresponding non-Markovian evolution.
Highlights
In out-of-equilibrium settings the entropy production is a fundamental thermodynamic quantity allowing to measure the degree of irreversibility of the dynamical evolution of physical systems
In the framework of stochastic thermodynamics [1], this irreversible contribution lies in the ratio between the probability to observe a specific trajectory of the system and the probability to observe its time-reversed partner
A similar framework of stochastic thermodynamics has been developed for quantum systems too [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], where the trajectory has to be mapped into the sequence of outcomes of measurements performed on the system
Summary
In out-of-equilibrium settings the entropy production is a fundamental thermodynamic quantity allowing to measure the degree of irreversibility of the dynamical evolution of physical systems. The importance of our result lies in the following consideration: despite that essentially non-Markovian evolutions allow for the existence of a time interval in which the average entropy production rate is negative [36], this does not necessarily imply a mitigation of irreversibility in general. As it is discussed below, there exist dynamical regimes in which, the mean value of the entropy distribution decreases in a given time interval, the variance does not have the same behavior. An example and analytical bounds are provided to corroborate our analysis
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