Quantum thermodynamics. Emergence of thermodynamic behavior within composite quantum systems (Q1019126)

This book introduces into the emergent field of the application of thermodynamics to describe phenomena arising with open quantum systems which consist in one or few particles. The first edition appeared in 2004 [for a detailed review see Zbl 1090.80001]. In this 2nd edition, the main parts II, \textit{``Equilibrium''}, III, \textit{``Non-equilibrium''}, and IV, \textit{``Applications''}, have been revised and are partly rewritten for to improve the readability. A clue of this book is that ergodicity or mixing are replaced by a kind of typicality which is introduced and used as a basic concept to define equilibrium. To that end the vector field on \({\mathbb R}^{2N}\) determined by the Schrödinger equation w.r.t. an orthonormal basis of \({\mathbb C}^N\) together with its flow is considered in order to define accessible regions of states and typical sets of states from which typical pure states may picked up. This is a heuristic approach and the results derived show how it works well.