Many-body effects on the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems

Thermodynamics of quantum systems out-of-equilibrium is very important for the progress of quantum technologies, however, the effects of many-body interactions and their interplay with temperature, different drives and dynamical regimes is still largely unknown. Here we present a systematic study of these interplays in the case of driven Hubbard chains subject to a variety of interaction (from non-interacting to strongly correlated) and dynamical regimes (from sudden quench to quasi-adiabatic), and discuss which effects all these ingredients have on the work extraction and entropy production. As treatment of many-body interacting systems is highly challenging, we introduce a simple approximation which includes, for the average quantum work, many-body interactions only via the initial state, while the dynamics is fully non-interacting. We demonstrate that this simple approximation is surprisingly good for estimating both the average quantum work and the related entropy production, even when many-body correlations are significant.