Quantum work statistics of charged Dirac particles in time-dependent fields

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2015-09-28

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Sebastian Deffner and Avadh Saxena, Quantum work statistics of charged Dirac particles in time-dependent fields, Phys. Rev. E 92, 032137 (2015), DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.032137

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Public Domain Mark 1.0
This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law

Subjects

Abstract

The quantum Jarzynski equality is an important theorem of modern quantum thermodynamics. We show that the Jarzynski equality readily generalizes to relativistic quantum mechanics described by the Dirac equation. After establishing the conceptual framework we solve a pedagogical, yet experimentally relevant, system analytically. As a main result we obtain the exact quantum work distributions for charged particles traveling through a time-dependent vector potential evolving under Schrödinger as well as under Dirac dynamics, and for which the Jarzynski equality is verified. Special emphasis is put on the conceptual and technical subtleties arising from relativistic quantum mechanics.