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Published on: October 23, 2014
Quantum fluctuations of entropy production for fermionic systems in the Landauer-Büttiker state
Mihail Mintchev1, Luca Santoni2, Paul Sorba3
1Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and Dipartimento di Fisica dell'Università di Pisa, Largo Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy.
Abstract:
The quantum fluctuations of the entropy production for fermionic systems in the Landauer-Büttiker nonequilibrium steady state are investigated. The probability distribution, governing these fluctuations, is explicitly derived by means of quantum field theory methods and analyzed in the zero frequency limit. It turns out that microscopic processes with positive, vanishing and negative entropy production occur in the system with nonvanishing probability. In spite of this fact, we show that all odd moments (in particular, the mean value of the entropy production) of the above distribution are non-negative. This result extends the second principle of thermodynamics to the quantum fluctuations of the entropy production in the Landauer-Büttiker state. The effect of the time reversal is also discussed.
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