Work statistics, irreversible heat and correlations build-up in joining two spin chains

Tony J. G. Apollaro, Gianluca Francica, Mauro Paternostro, Michele Campisi

Published 2014-06-03Version 1

We investigate the influences of quantum many-body effects, such as criticality and the existence of factorisation fields, in the thermodynamic cost of establishing a bonding link between two independent quantum spin chains. We provide a physical interpretation of the behavior of irreversible work spent in such process by linking the phenomenology of such quantities to the properties of the spectrum of the system