Energy flow in non-equilibrium conformal field theory

Abstract

We study the energy current and its fluctuations in quantum gapless 1d\nsystems far from equilibrium modeled by conformal field theory, where two\nseparated halves are prepared at distinct temperatures and glued together at a\npoint contact. We prove that these systems converge towards steady states, and\ngive a general description of such non-equilibrium steady states in terms of\nquantum field theory data. We compute the large deviation function, also called\nthe full counting statistics, of energy transfer through the contact. These are\nuniversal and satisfy fluctuation relations. We provide a simple representation\nof these quantum fluctuations in terms of classical Poisson processes whose\nintensities are proportional to Boltzmann weights.\n