TY - JOUR
T1 - Failure of Local Thermal Equilibrium in Quantum Friction
AU - Intravaia, F.
AU - Behunin, R. O.
AU - Henkel, C.
AU - Busch, K.
AU - Dalvit, D. A.R.
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge support by the LANL LDRD program, and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through project B10 within the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 951 Hybrid Inorganic/Organic Systems for Opto-Electronics (HIOS). F. I. further acknowledges financial support from the European Union Marie Curie People program through the Career Integration Grant No. PCIG14-GA-2013-631571. C. H. and F. I. acknowledge support from the DFG through the DIP program (Grant No. SCHM 1049/7-1). R. B. further acknowledges financial support provided by NSF MRSEC DMR-1119826, the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering as well as Yale University startup funding.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Physical Society.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - Recent progress in manipulating atomic and condensed matter systems has instigated a surge of interest in nonequilibrium physics, including many-body dynamics of trapped ultracold atoms and ions, near-field radiative heat transfer, and quantum friction. Under most circumstances the complexity of such nonequilibrium systems requires a number of approximations to make theoretical descriptions tractable. In particular, it is often assumed that spatially separated components of a system thermalize with their immediate surroundings, although the global state of the system is out of equilibrium. This powerful assumption reduces the complexity of nonequilibrium systems to the local application of well-founded equilibrium concepts. While this technique appears to be consistent for the description of some phenomena, we show that it fails for quantum friction by underestimating by approximately 80% the magnitude of the drag force. Our results show that the correlations among the components of driven, but steady-state, quantum systems invalidate the assumption of local thermal equilibrium, calling for a critical reexamination of this approach for describing the physics of nonequilibrium systems.
AB - Recent progress in manipulating atomic and condensed matter systems has instigated a surge of interest in nonequilibrium physics, including many-body dynamics of trapped ultracold atoms and ions, near-field radiative heat transfer, and quantum friction. Under most circumstances the complexity of such nonequilibrium systems requires a number of approximations to make theoretical descriptions tractable. In particular, it is often assumed that spatially separated components of a system thermalize with their immediate surroundings, although the global state of the system is out of equilibrium. This powerful assumption reduces the complexity of nonequilibrium systems to the local application of well-founded equilibrium concepts. While this technique appears to be consistent for the description of some phenomena, we show that it fails for quantum friction by underestimating by approximately 80% the magnitude of the drag force. Our results show that the correlations among the components of driven, but steady-state, quantum systems invalidate the assumption of local thermal equilibrium, calling for a critical reexamination of this approach for describing the physics of nonequilibrium systems.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.100402
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.100402
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84988884486
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 117
JO - Physical Review Letters
JF - Physical Review Letters
IS - 10
M1 - 100402
ER -