We discuss the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by a change in a control parameter and undergoing a unitary process. We compare the work actually done on the system with the one that would be performed along ideal adiabatic and isothermal transformations. The comparison with the latter leads to the introduction of irreversible work, while that with the former leads to the introduction of inner friction. We show that these two quantities can be treated on an equal footing, as both can be linked with the heat exchanged in thermalization processes and both can be expressed as relative entropies. Furthermore, we show that a specific fluctuation relation for the entropy production associated with the inner friction exists, which allows the inner friction to be written in terms of its cumulants.

We analyze the nature of the statistics of the work done on or by a quantum many-body system brought out of equilibrium. We show that, for the sudden quench and for an initial state that commutes with the initial Hamiltonian, it is possible to retrieve the whole nonequilibrium thermodynamics via single projective measurements of observables. We highlight, in a physically clear way, the qualitative implications for the statistics of work coming from considering processes described by operators that either commute or do not commute with the unperturbed Hamiltonian of a given system. We consider a quantum many-body system and derive an expression that allows us to give a physical interpretation, for a thermal initial state, to all of the cumulants of the work in the case of quenched operators commuting with the unperturbed Hamiltonian. In the commuting case, the observables that we need to measure have an intuitive physical meaning. Conversely, in the noncommuting case, we show that, although it is possible to operate fully within the single-measurement framework irrespectively of the size of the quench, some difficulties are faced in providing a clear-cut physical interpretation to the cumulants. This circumstance makes the study of the physics of the system nontrivial and highlights the nonintuitive phenomenology of the emergence of thermodynamics from the fully quantum microscopic description. We illustrate our ideas with the example of the Ising model in a transverse field showing the interesting behavior of the high-order statistical moments of the work distribution for a generic thermal state and linking them to the critical nature of the model itself.

The capability of faithfully transmit quantum states and entanglement through quantum channels is one of the key requirements for the development of quantum devices. Different solutions have been proposed to accomplish such a challenging task, which, however, require either an ad hoc engineering of the internal interactions of the physical system acting as the channel or specific initialization procedures. Here we show that optimal dynamics for efficient quantum-state and entanglement transfer can be attained in generic quantum systems with homogeneous interactions by tuning the coupling between the system and the two attached qubits. We devise a general procedure to determine the optimal coupling, and we explicitly implement it in the case of a channel consisting of a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ $\mathit{XY}$ chain. The quality of quantum-state and entanglement transfer is found to be very good and, remarkably, almost independent of the channel length.

Quantum-state transfer with fidelity higher than $0.99$ can be achieved in the ballistic regime of an arbitrarily long one-dimensional chain with uniform nearest-neighbor interaction, except for the two pairs of mirror-symmetric extremal bonds, say $x$ (first and last) and $y$ (second and penultimate). These have to be roughly tuned to suitable values $x\sim 2N^{-1/3}$ and $y\sim 2^{3/4}{N}^{-1/6}$, where $N$ is the chain length. The general framework can describe the end-to-end response in different models, such as fermion or boson hopping models and $XX$ spin chains.

Using recently proposed measures for non-Markovianity [H.-P. Breuer, E. M. Laine, and J. Piilo, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009)], we study the dynamics of a qubit coupled to a spin environment via an energy-exchange mechanism. We show the existence of a point, in the parameter space of the system, where the qubit dynamics is effectively Markovian and that such a point separates two regions with completely different dynamical behaviors. Indeed, our study demonstrates that the qubit evolution can in principle be tuned from a perfectly forgetful one to a deep non-Markovian regime where the qubit is strongly affected by the dynamical backaction of the environmental spins. By means of a theoretical quantum process tomography analysis, we provide a complete and intuitive characterization of the qubit channel.

Two different models are presented that allow for efficiently performing routing of a quantum state. Both cases involve an $XX$ spin chain working as a data bus and additional spins that play the role of sender and receivers, one of which is selected to be the target of the quantum state transmission protocol via a coherent quantum coupling mechanism making use of local and/or global magnetic fields. Quantum routing is achieved in the first of the models considered by weakly coupling the sender and the receiver to the data bus. On the other hand, in the second model, local magnetic fields acting on additional spins located between the sender and receiver and the data bus allow us to perform high-fidelity routing.