Irreversible processes without energy dissipation in an isolated Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model
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2015
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American Physical Society
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Abstract
For a certain class of isolated quantum systems, we report the existence of irreversible processes in which the energy is not dissipated. After a closed cycle in which the initial energy distribution is fully recovered, the expectation value of a symmetry-breaking observable changes from a value differing from zero in the initial state to zero in the final state. This entails the unavoidable loss of a certain amount of information and constitutes a source of irreversibility. We show that the von Neumann entropy of time-averaged equilibrium states increases in the same magnitude as a consequence of the process. We support this result by means of numerical calculations in an experimentally feasible system, the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.
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© 2015 American Physical Society. We thank O. Marty for useful discussions. The work was supported by a grant by the Spanish Government for research Project No. FIS2012-35316, an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, the EU Integrating Project SIQS, and the EU STREP project EQUAM. Part of the calculations of this work were performed in the high-capacity cluster for physics, funded in part by Universidad Complutense de Madrid and in part with Feder funding. This is a contribution to the Campus of International Excellence of Moncloa, CEI Moncloa.