The production rate of the system-bath mutual information

Abstract

When an open system is contacted with several thermal baths, the entropy produced by the irreversible processes ($dS_{\mathrm{i}}=dS-\sum_{\alpha}\text{\dj}Q_{\alpha}/T_{\alpha}$) keeps increasing, and this entropy production rate is always non-negative. But when the system is contacted with some non-thermal baths containing quantum coherence or squeezing, this entropy production formula does not apply. In this paper, we study the increasing rate of the mutual information between the open system and its environment. When the baths are canonical thermal ones, we prove that this mutual information production rate could exactly return to the previous entropy production rate. Further, we study an example of a single boson mode contacted with multiple squeezed thermal baths, where the conventional entropy production rate does not apply, and we find that this mutual information production rate still keeps non-negative, which means the monotonic increasing of the correlation between the system and its environment.