Steady state entanglement in open and noisy quantum systems at high temperature

We show that quantum mechanical entanglement can prevail even in noisy open quantum systems at high temperature and far from thermodynamical equilibrium, despite the deteriorating effect of decoherence. The system consists of a number N of interacting quantum particles, and it can interact and exchange particles with some environment. The effect of decoherence is counteracted by a simple mechanism, where system particles are randomly reset to some standard initial state, e.g. by replacing them with particles from the environment. We present a master equation that describes this process, which we can solve analytically for small N. If we vary the interaction strength and the reset against decoherence rate, we find a threshold below which the equilibrium state is classically correlated, and above which there is a parameter region with genuine entanglement.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

A spin foam model for general Lorentzian 4-geometries

We derive simplicity constraints for the quantization of general Lorentzian 4-geometries. Our method is based on the correspondence between coherent states and classical bivectors and the minimization of associated uncertainties. For spacelike geometries, this scheme agrees with the master constraint method of the model by Engle, Pereira, Rovelli and Livine (EPRL). When it is applied to general Lorentzian geometries, we obtain new constraints that include the EPRL constraints as a special case. They imply a discrete area spectrum for both spacelike and timelike surfaces. We use these constraints to define a spin foam model for general Lorentzian 4-geometries.Comment: 27 pages, 1 figure; v4: published versio

OB Stars in the Solar Neighborhood I: Analysis of their Spatial Distribution

We present a newly-developed, three-dimensional spatial classification method, designed to analyze the spatial distribution of early type stars within the 1 kpc sphere around the Sun. We propose a distribution model formed by two intersecting disks -the Gould Belt (GB) and the Local Galactic Disk (LGD)- defined by their fundamental geometric parameters. Then, using a sample of about 550 stars of spectral types earlier than B6 and luminosity classes between III and V, with precise photometric distances of less than 1 kpc, we estimate for some spectral groups the parameters of our model, as well as single membership probabilities of GB and LGD stars, thus drawing a picture of the spatial distribution of young stars in the vicinity of the Sun.Comment: 28 pages including 9 Postscript figures, one of them in color. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, 30 January 200

Quantum bath refrigeration towards absolute zero: unattainability principle challenged

A minimal model of a quantum refrigerator (QR), i.e. a periodically phase-flipped two-level system permanently coupled to a finite-capacity bath (cold bath) and an infinite heat dump (hot bath), is introduced and used to investigate the cooling of the cold bath towards the absolute zero (T=0). Remarkably, the temperature scaling of the cold-bath cooling rate reveals that it does not vanish as T->0 for certain realistic quantized baths, e.g. phonons in strongly disordered media (fractons) or quantized spin-waves in ferromagnets (magnons). This result challenges Nernst's third-law formulation known as the unattainability principle

Quantum Approach to a Derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

We re-interprete the microcanonical conditions in the quantum domain as constraints for the interaction of the "gas-subsystem" under consideration and its environment ("container"). The time-average of a purity-measure is found to equal the average over the respective path in Hilbert-space. We then show that for typical (degenerate or non-degenerate) thermodynamical systems almost all states within the allowed region of Hilbert-space have a local von Neumann-entropy S close to the maximum and a purity P close to its minimum, respectively. Typically thermodynamical systems should therefore obey the second law.Comment: 4 pages. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Spin foams with timelike surfaces

Spin foams of 4d gravity were recently extended from complexes with purely spacelike surfaces to complexes that also contain timelike surfaces. In this article, we express the associated partition function in terms of vertex amplitudes and integrals over coherent states. The coherent states are characterized by unit 3--vectors which represent normals to surfaces and lie either in the 2--sphere or the 2d hyperboloids. In the case of timelike surfaces, a new type of coherent state is used and the associated completeness relation is derived. It is also shown that the quantum simplicity constraints can be deduced by three different methods: by weak imposition of the constraints, by restriction of coherent state bases and by the master constraint.Comment: 22 pages, no figures; v2: remarks on operator formalism added in discussion; correction: the spin 1/2 irrep of the discrete series does not appear in the Plancherel decompositio

Optimal refrigerator

We study a refrigerator model which consists of two $n$-level systems interacting via a pulsed external field. Each system couples to its own thermal bath at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively ($\theta\equiv T_c/T_h<1$). The refrigerator functions in two steps: thermally isolated interaction between the systems driven by the external field and isothermal relaxation back to equilibrium. There is a complementarity between the power of heat transfer from the cold bath and the efficiency: the latter nullifies when the former is maximized and {\it vice versa}. A reasonable compromise is achieved by optimizing the product of the heat-power and efficiency over the Hamiltonian of the two system. The efficiency is then found to be bounded from below by $\zeta_{\rm CA}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\theta}}-1$ (an analogue of the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency), besides being bound from above by the Carnot efficiency $\zeta_{\rm C} = \frac{1}{1-\theta}-1$. The lower bound is reached in the equilibrium limit $\theta\to 1$. The Carnot bound is reached (for a finite power and a finite amount of heat transferred per cycle) for $\ln n\gg 1$. If the above maximization is constrained by assuming homogeneous energy spectra for both systems, the efficiency is bounded from above by $\zeta_{\rm CA}$ and converges to it for $n\gg 1$.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Optimal Control of Quantum Dissipative Dynamics: Analytic solution for cooling the three level Λ\Lambda system

We study the problem of optimal control of dissipative quantum dynamics. Although under most circumstances dissipation leads to an increase in entropy (or a decrease in purity) of the system, there is an important class of problems for which dissipation with external control can decrease the entropy (or increase the purity) of the system. An important example is laser cooling. In such systems, there is an interplay of the Hamiltonian part of the dynamics, which is controllable and the dissipative part of the dynamics, which is uncontrollable. The strategy is to control the Hamiltonian portion of the evolution in such a way that the dissipation causes the purity of the system to increase rather than decrease. The goal of this paper is to find the strategy that leads to maximal purity at the final time. Under the assumption that Hamiltonian control is complete and arbitrarily fast, we provide a general framework by which to calculate optimal cooling strategies. These assumptions lead to a great simplification, in which the control problem can be reformulated in terms of the spectrum of eigenvalues of $\rho$, rather than $\rho$ itself. By combining this formulation with the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theorem we are able to obtain an equation for the globaly optimal cooling strategy in terms of the spectrum of the density matrix. For the three-level $\Lambda$ system, we provide a complete analytic solution for the optimal cooling strategy. For this system it is found that the optimal strategy does not exploit system coherences and is a 'greedy' strategy, in which the purity is increased maximally at each instant.Comment: 9 pages, 3 fig

Optimal control of entanglement via quantum feedback

It has recently been shown that finding the optimal measurement on the environment for stationary Linear Quadratic Gaussian control problems is a semi-definite program. We apply this technique to the control of the EPR-correlations between two bosonic modes interacting via a parametric Hamiltonian at steady state. The optimal measurement turns out to be nonlocal homodyne measurement -- the outputs of the two modes must be combined before measurement. We also find the optimal local measurement and control technique. This gives the same degree of entanglement but a higher degree of purity than the local technique previously considered [S. Mancini, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 73}, 010304(R) (2006)].Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Positive Quantum Brownian Evolution

Using the independent oscillator model with an arbitrary system potential, we derive a quantum Brownian equation assuming a correlated total initial state. Although not of Lindblad form, the equation preserves positivity of the density operator on a restricted set of initial states