Heat flow in non-equilibrium conformal field theory
Presenter
March 27, 2012
Keywords:
- mathematical physics
- mathematical statistical mechanics
- conformal field theory
- conformal invariance
- probability theory
- random point process
- SLE
- heat flow
- non-equilibrium statistical mechanics
- boundary layers and boundary conditions
- Gibbs state
- partition functions
MSC:
- 60K35
- 60J45
- 60J65
- 60J67
- 60Jxx
- 60-xx
- 60G57
- 60G60
- 82-xx
- 80A20
Abstract
We shall describe the heat current and its fluctuations in quantum gapless 1d systems far from equilibrium modeled by conformal field theory, where two separated halves are prepared at distinct temperatures and glued together at a point contact. We prove that these systems converge towards steady states, and give a general description of such non-
equilibrium steady states in terms of quantum field theory data. We compute the full counting statistics of energy transfer through the contact. These are universal and satisfy fluctuation relations. We provide a simple representation of these quantum fluctuations in terms of classical Poisson processes whose intensities are proportional to Boltzmann weights.
Based on joint work with Benjamin Doyon.