Heating & cooling by measurement: Zeno meets Lindblad


  Noam Erez  
Tel Aviv University

Time-energy uncertainty generically manifests itself in the short time behavior of a system weakly coupled to a bath, in the energy non-conservation of the interaction term (H_I does not commute with H_0). Similarly, the monotonic evolution of the system density operator to its equilibrium value which is a universal property of quantum dynamical semigroups (Spohn's theorem), e.g., systems with Lindbladian evolution, is in general violated at short (non-Markovian) timescales. For example, frequent, brief non-demolition measurements of the energy states of a two level system (TLS) coupled to a bath, disturbs the thermal equilibrium between them, despite leaving the system and bath states separately unperturbed. For sufficiently short intervals between measurements (Zeno regime) the system and bath heat up immediately following the measurement. The evolution of the system state away from its equilibrium value, not only violates the Markovian-dynamics version of the 2nd law (Spohn's theorem), but also Lindblad's theorem on which it rests, which is valid for any evolution described by a completely positive map. This apparent contradiction is resolved. The equivalence of a non-selective measurement to a random unitary, suggests a classical analog. 

[N. Erez, G. Gordon, M. Nest, and G. Kurizki, Nature 452, 724-727 (2008)]