Virtual participation: Zoom details available here
Speaker: Professor John Goold, Trinity College Dublin
Title: "Thermodynamics of the quantum Mpemba effect"
Abstract: We investigate the quantum Mpemba effect from the perspective of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics by studying relaxation dynamics described by Davies maps. Starting from a state with coherences in the energy eigenbasis, we demonstrate that an exponential speedup to equilibrium will always occur if the state is transformed to a diagonal state in the energy eigenbasis, provided that the spectral gap of the generator is defined by a complex eigenvalue. When the transformed state has a higher non-equilibrium free energy, we argue using thermodynamic reasoning that this is a \textit{genuine} quantum Mpemba effect. Furthermore, we show how a unitary transformation on an initial state can always be constructed to yield the effect and demonstrate our findings by studying the dynamics of both the non-equilibrium free energy and the irreversible entropy production in single and multi-qubit examples.
Biography: Prof. John Goold is the leader of the QuSys group at Trinity College Dublin and a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His groups work is on topics ranging from non-equilibrium quantum dynamics and thermodynamics to quantum thermodynamics. John was the founder of the TCD MSc program on Quantum Science and Technology and he is the founding director of the Trinity Quantum Alliance which is a physical space where academia meets industry to work on topics in quantum simulation.