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Updated: Sep 11, 2025

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Quantum stochastic thermodynamics in the mesoscopic-leads formulation
Laetitia P Bettmann1, Michael J Kewming1, Gabriel T Landi2
1Trinity College Dublin, School of Physics, College Green, Dublin 2, D02K8N4, Ireland.
Abstract:
We introduce a numerical method to sample the distributions of charge, heat, and entropy production in open quantum systems coupled strongly to macroscopic reservoirs, with both temporal and energy resolution and beyond the linear-response regime. Our method exploits the mesoscopic-leads formulation, where macroscopic reservoirs are modeled by a finite collection of modes that are continuously damped toward thermal equilibrium by an appropriate Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad master equation. Focussing on noninteracting fermionic systems, we access the time-resolved full counting statistics through a trajectory unraveling of the master equation. We show that the integral fluctuation theorems for the total entropy production, as well as the martingale and uncertainty entropy production, hold. Furthermore, we investigate the fluctuations of the dissipated heat in finite-time information erasure. Conceptually, our approach extends the continuous-time trajectory description of quantum stochastic thermodynamics beyond the regime of weak system-environment coupling.
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