Using the scattering approach to the construction of Non-Equilibrium Steady States proposed by Ruelle we study the transport properties of systems of independent electrons. We show that Landauer-Büttiker and Green-Kubo formulas hold under very general conditions.

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Abstract. We investigate the dynamics of an N-level system linearly coupled to a field of mass-less bosons at positive temperature. Using complex deformation techniques, we develop time-dependent perturbation theory and study spectral properties of the total Hamiltonian. We also calculate the lifetime of resonances to second order in the coupling.

We study spectral properties of Pauli Fierz operators which are commonly used to describe the interaction of a small quantum system with a bosonic free field. We give precise estimates of the location and multiplicity of the singular spectrum of such operators. Applications of these estimates, which will be discussed elsewhere, concern spectral and ergodic theory of non-relativistic QED. Our proof has two ingredients: the Feshbach method, which is developed in an abstract framework, and Mourre theory applied to the operator restricted to the sector orthogonal to the vacuum.

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In this paper we study the dynamics of fermionic mixed states in the mean-field regime. We consider initial states that are close to quasi-free states and prove that, under suitable assumptions on the initial data and on the many-body interaction, the quantum evolution of such initial data is well approximated by a suitable quasi-free state. In particular, we prove that the evolution of the reduced one-particle density matrix converges, as the number of particles goes to infinity, to the solution of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock equation. Our result holds for all times and gives effective estimates on the rate of convergence of the many-body dynamics towards the Hartree-Fock evolution.

We investigate the dynamics of a 2-level atom (or spin ^) coupled to a mass-less bosonic field at positive temperature. We prove that, at small coupling, the combined quantum system approaches thermal equilibrium. Moreover we establish that this approach is exponentially fast in time. We first reduce the question to a spectral problem for the Liouvillean, a self-adjoint operator naturally associated with the system. To compute this operator, we invoke Tomita-Takesaki theory. Once this is done we use complex deformation techniques to study its spectrum. The corresponding zero temperature model is also reviewed and compared. From a more philosophical point of view our results show that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, quantum dynamics can be simpler at positive than at zero temperature.

Given a W*-algebra [Formula: see text] with a W*-dynamics τ, we prove the existence of the perturbed W*-dynamics for a large class of unbounded perturbations. We compute its Liouvillean. If τ has a β-KMS state, and the perturbation satisfies some mild assumptions related to the Golden–Thompson inequality, we prove the existence of a β-KMS state for the perturbed W*-dynamics. These results extend the well known constructions due to Araki valid for bounded perturbations.