Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China.
Phys Rev E. 2018 Jan;97(1-1):012128. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.012128.
A main problem, which is met when computing the energy transfer of or work done by a quantum system, comes from the fact that the system may lie in states with coherence in its energy eigenstates. As is well known, when the so-called environment-induced decoherence has happened with respect to a preferred basis given by the energy basis, no coherence exists among the energy basis and the energy change of the system can be computed in a definite way. I argue that one may make use of this property, in the search for an appropriate definition of quantum work for a total system that does not include any measuring apparatus. To show how this idea may work, in this paper, I study decoherence properties of a generic slowly driven system, which is weakly coupled to a huge environment whose main body is a complex quantum system. It is shown that decoherence may generically happen for such a system.
当计算量子系统的能量转移或功时，一个主要的问题来自于这样一个事实，即系统可能处于能量本征态的相干状态。众所周知，当相对于能量基给出的优选基发生所谓的环境诱导退相干时，能量基之间不存在相干性，并且可以以确定的方式计算系统的能量变化。我认为，人们可以利用这一特性，为不包括任何测量仪器的总系统寻找量子功的适当定义。为了展示这个想法是如何起作用的，在本文中，我研究了一个通用的缓慢驱动系统的退相干特性，该系统与一个巨大的环境弱耦合，其主体是一个复杂的量子系统。结果表明，这种系统通常会发生退相干。
