title: Dynamics and thermodynamics of linear quantum open systems.
abstract: We analyze the evolution of the quantum state of networks of quantum oscillators coupled with arbitrary external environments. We show that the reduced density matrix of the network always obeys a local master equation with a simple analytical solution. We use this to study the emergence of thermodynamical laws in the long time regime demonstrating two main results: First, we show that it is impossible to build a quantum absorption refrigerator using linear networks (thus, nonlinearity is an essential resource for such refrigerators recently studied by Levy and Kosloff [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 070604 (2012)] and Levy et al. [Phys. Rev. B 85, 061126 (2012)]). Then, we show that the third law imposes constraints on the low frequency behavior of the environmental spectral densities.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, FCEyN, UBA, Ciudad Universitaria Pabellón 1, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Esteban A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Martinez
authors.forename: Juan Pablo
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Paz