Thermodynamics of decoherence

Abstract

We investigate the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of pure decoherence. In a pure decoherence process, the system Hamiltonian is a constant of motion and there is no direct energy exchange between the system and its surroundings. Nevertheless, the environment’s energy is not generally conserved and in this work we show that this leads to non-trivial heat dissipation as a result of decoherence alone. This heat has some very distinctive properties: it obeys an integral fluctuation relation and can be interpreted in terms of the entropy production associated with populations in the energy eigenbasis of the initial state. We show that the heat distribution for a pure decoherence process is different from the distribution of work done by the initial system–bath interaction quench. Instead, it corresponds to a mixture of work distributions of cyclical processes, each conditioned on a state of the open system. Inspired by recent experiments on impurities in ultracold gases, we demonstrate our general results by studying the heat generated by the decoherence of a qubit immersed within a degenerate Fermi gas in the lowest band of a species-selective optical lattice.