Quantum macrostatistical theory of nonequilibrium steady states

We provide a general macrostatistical formulation of nonequilibrium steady states of reservoir driven quantum systems. This formulation is centered on the large scale properties of the locally conserved hydrodynamical observables, and our basic physical assumptions comprise (a) a chaoticity hypothesis for the nonconserved currents carried by these observables, (b) an extension of Onsager's regression hypothesis to fluctuations about nonequilibrium states, and (c) a certain mesoscopic local equilibrium hypothesis. On this basis, we obtain a picture wherein the fluctuations of the hydrodynamical variables about a nonequilibrium steady state execute a Gaussian Markov process of a generalized Onsager-Machlup type, which is completely determined by the position dependent transport coefficients and the equilibrium entropy function of the system. This picture reveals that the transport coefficients satisfy a generalized form of the Onsager reciprocity relations in the nonequilibrium situation and that the spatial correlations of the hydrodynamical observables are generically of long range. This last result constitutes a model-independent quantum mechanical generalization of that obtained for special classical stochastic systems and marks a striking difference between the steady nonequilibrium and equilibrium states, since it is only at critical points that the latter carry long range correlations.