Work statistics, irreversible heat and correlations build-up in joining two spin chains

Abstract

We investigate the influences of quantum many-body effects, such as criticality and the existence of factorization fields, in the thermodynamic cost of establishing a bonding link between two independent quantum spin chains. We provide a physical interpretation of the behavior of irreversible work spent in such a process by linking the phenomenology of such quantities to the properties of the spectrum of the system.