Abstract
A master equation is derived to describe quantum systems connected to dynamically-evolving mesoscopic baths, progressing towards the control of nanoscale quantum technologies such as engines and refrigerators.
Highlights
To understand the potential of future quantum technologies, it is essential to develop an efficient description of microscopic systems far from equilibrium
We show that the extended microcanonical master equation” (EMME) does provide an efficient way to describe the non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems but it connects to a plethora of actively discussed topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
V, we introduce a consistent nonequilibrium thermodynamic framework that includes slowly driven systems
Summary
To understand the potential of future quantum technologies, it is essential to develop an efficient description of microscopic systems far from equilibrium. Quantum master equations are an important tool to describe the nonequilibrium dynamics of small systems in contact with an external environment [1,2,3]. Master equations have the advantage that they apply to a large class of open systems, are intuitive, and often allow further analytical progress in the description. The idea is to keep track of the bath dynamics at a coarse-grained level and include to some degree system-bath correlations This approach was previously formalized using correlated projection operator techniques [5,6,7,8] and it has been shown to significantly improve standard perturbative master equations [6,8,9,10]. To keep the presentation focused, generalizations and additional results are shifted to the Appendixes
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