Quantum Thermodynamics for Driven Dissipative Bosonic Systems

The formulation of thermodynamic concepts applicable to molecular and nanoscale devices has motivated intense research, as such systems provide a unique setting to study heat transfer, power work and dissipation far from the thermodynamic limit. In the quantum regime, dynamics, broadening of energy levels and interference can play important roles and have been studied within the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics. In this talk we describe recent results in the study of two prototypical dissipative bosonic systems under slow driving and arbitrary system-bath coupling strength. Specifically, we look at the damped harmonic oscillator and the damped two-level system. For the former, we study independently the slow time-dependent perturbation in the oscillator frequency and in the coupling strength. For the latter, we concentrate on the slow modulation of the energy gap between the two levels. Importantly, we are able to find the entropy production rates for each case without explicitly defining nonequilibrium extensions for the entropy functional. This analysis also permits the definition of phenomenological friction coefficients in terms of structural properties of the system-bath composite.