19 Heat Conduction

Abstract

In Chap. 17 we have considered the route of a system into its global equilibrium state due to the coupling to an environment - the way from a nonequilibrium initial state into the stationary global equilibrium state. In fact, this relaxation process may even look like an exponential decay described by a rate equation, i.e., a statistical behavior for the considered system, while system and environment follow a Schrödinger equation. This is the key-feature of the Schrödinger dynamics of bipartite systems, by which the problem of time reversal invariance of microscopic equations and irreversibility can be overcome.