“This coherent presentation of a timely topic is a significant achievement with nothing comparable on the market.”

Udo Seifert, University of Stuttgart

NEW! NEW! NEW!

Second paperback edition out since September 2024! It’s cheaper and has around 100 small updates. Thanks for your trust.

Errata (for the 1st edition)

• General: For some reason that I do not understand, the index is a bit of mess. Please add to the page numbers in the index a random number taken from {0,1,2,3,4,5} to increase your chances to hit the right page…
• Here and there: I’ve been a bit sloppy with the use of the word “extensivity”, which sometimes need be replaced by “additivity”, for instance, in and around Exercise 2.26 on page 9.2.¹
• Page 20: Typo in the line above eqn (1.48): It has to read
• Page 49, below eqn (2.17): Equivalence of ensembles applies not if the density of states grows quickly enough, but if the Boltzmann entropy is a concave function of energy.
• Page 54: In the first paragraph of the “Rate master equation” section: the stochastic matrices need be normalized for all and not all , of course.
• Page 73, below eqn (2.89): There should be no star * on
• Page 106: In eqn (3.8) and twice below need be replaced by [noticed by Hector Silva]
• Page 113, Fig. 3.1: I only plot the real part of the correlation function.
• Page 123, Exercise 3.12: In the Hint the operator should be instead of
• Page 138, Exercise 3.19: Please replace \pi by \pi^\star in eqns (3.103) and (3.104). [noticed by Ludovico Tesser]
• Page 145: There is a missing at the beginning of the fourth line below eqn (3.120). [noticed by Cyril Elouard and Camille Latune]
• Page 155: For the steady state regime in eqn (3.153) it is necessary to assume that is periodic with period
• Page 222: References about TURs: I was too quick by stating that “generalized TURs could only be established in the linear response regime”. There are a couple of interesting generalizations, even though they involve some backwards quantities. Check out this or that. [Communicated by Patrick Potts.]
• Page 252+: In Sec. 5.6 there is some inconsistent notation for the system-ancilla and preparation-ancilla interaction Hamiltonian: I switch between V_{PA} and H_{PA} or V_{SA} and H_{SA}, but I always mean the same object. [noticed by Ludovico Tesser]
• Page 254: Eqns (5.101) and (5.102): \ln(iU) should be replaced by i\ln(U). [noticed by Ludovico Tesser]
• Eqn (B.30): Please replace a_1, b_1 of the first unitary time-evolution (super)operator by a’_1, b’_1 and a_0, b_0 of the second unitary time-evolution (super)operator by a’_0, b’_0 (as in the two equations above). [noticed by Ludovico Tesser]

1. Extensivity refers to one substance and looks something like , where is some state function (such as internal energy), the geometric volume and some scale. Additivity instead refers to two (or more) potentially different substances, e.g., . ↩︎