Understanding and simulating how a quantum system interacts and exchanges information or energy with its surroundings is a ubiquitous problem, one which must be carefully addressed in order to establish a coherent framework to describe the dynamics and thermodynamics of quantum systems. Significant effort has been invested in developing various methods for tackling this issue and in this Perspective paper we focus on one such technique, namely collision models, which have emerged as a remarkably flexible approach. We discuss their application to understanding non-Markovian dynamics and to studying the thermodynamics of quantum systems, two areas in which collision models have proven to be particularly insightful. Their simple structure endows them with extremely broad applicability which has spurred their recent experimental demonstrations. By focusing on these areas, our aim is to provide a succinct entry point to this remarkable framework.

理解和模拟量子系统如何与其周围环境相互作用和交换信息或能量是一个普遍存在的问题，必须仔细解决这个问题，以便建立一个连贯的框架来描述量子系统的动力学和热力学。在开发解决这个问题的各种方法方面投入了大量精力，在这篇 Perspective 论文中，我们专注于一种这样的技术，即碰撞模型，它已经成为一种非常灵活的方法。我们讨论了它们在理解非马尔可夫动力学和研究量子系统的热力学方面的应用，碰撞模型在这两个领域中被证明是特别有见地的。它们简单的结构赋予它们极其广泛的适用性，这激发了它们最近的实验演示。