Quantum Work in the Bohmian framework

Understand

At non-zero temperature classical systems exhibit statistical fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities arising from the variation of the system's initial conditions and its interaction with the environment.

• The fluctuating work, for example, is characterised by the ensemble of system trajectories in phase space and, by including the probabilities for various trajectories to occur, a work distribution can be constructed.
• However, without phase space trajectories, the task of constructing a work probability distribution in the quantum regime has proven elusive.
• Here we use quantum trajectories in phase space and define fluctuating work as power integrated along the trajectories, in complete analogy to classical statistical physics.