Quantum fluctuation relations for the Lindblad master equation (Q453772)

During the last twenty years it has been shown that various remarkable discovered relations satisfy fluctuations in non-equilibrium systems. These results have lead to many interesting discussions concerning the nature of heat, work and entropy, raising the fundamental issue of understanding the interactions between a given system and its environment. Many approaches have been proposed and the authors use in their paper the one which is based on the assumption that the system is modeled by an effective master equation at the macroscopic scale. This is the Lindblad equation. This paper presents a study of the non-equilibrium fluctuations of an open quantum system. The above approach is used for a suitable deformation of the master equation. This allow to prove a generic relation amongst correlation functions, a kind of book-keeping formula (a quantum analog of Jarzynski-Hatano-Sasa relation and Crooks relation). The authors derive a generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem valid in the vicinity of a quantum non-equilibrium steady state. The paper is divided into five sections and three appendixes. After the preliminaries, a presentation of basic properties of the Lindblad equation and a proof of quantum Jarzynski-Hatano-Sasa relation connected to this equation are given. Section 4 shows the properties for a given Lindblad evolution under time-reversal. The appendices deliver technical details.