Contact geometry and quantum thermodynamics of nanoscale steady states

Abstract: We develop a geometric formalism suited for describing the quantum thermodynamics of a certain class of nanoscale systems (whose density matrix is expressible in the McLennan--Zubarev form) at any arbitrary non-equilibrium steady state. It is shown that the non-equilibrium steady states are points on control parameter spaces which are in a sense generated by the steady state Massieu--Planck function. By suitably altering the system's boundary conditions, it is possible to take the system from one steady state to another. We provide a contact Hamiltonian description of such transformations and show that moving along the geodesics of the friction tensor results in a minimum increase of the free entropy along the transformation. The control parameter space is shown to be equipped with a natural Riemannian metric that is compatible with the contact structure of the quantum thermodynamic phase space which when expressed in a local coordinate chart, coincides with the Schl\"{o}gl metric. Finally, we show that this metric is conformally related to other thermodynamic Hessian metrics which might be written on control parameter spaces. This provides various alternate ways of computing the Schl\"{o}gl metric which is known to be equivalent to the Fisher information matrix.