Dynamics and thermodynamics of linear quantum open systems

Abstract

We analyze the behavior of a network of quantum oscillators coupled with a number of external environments. We show that the dynamics is such that the quantum state of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermodynamical laws in the stationary regime, achieved for sufficiently long times if the environments are dissipative. We show that the validity of the second law implies the impossibility of building a quantum refrigerator without moving parts (therefore, a quantum absorption refrigerators requires non-linearity as an crucial ingredient, as recently proposed by Kosloff and others cite{Kosloff1,Kosloff2}). We also show that the third law imposes strong constraints on the low frequency behavior of the environmental spectral densities.