Work statistics, irreversible heat and correlations build-up in joining   two spin chains
  We investigate the influences of quantum many-body effects, such as criticality and the existence of factorisation 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 process by linking the phenomenology of such quantities to the properties of the spectrum of the system 
Tony J. G. Apollaro, Gianluca Francica, Mauro Paternostro, Michele   Campisi
cond-mat.stat-mech quant-ph