Laboratoire de Physique Théorique
Toulouse - UMR 5152

The work distribution is a fundamental quantity in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, mainly due to its connection with fluctuation theorems. The common definition of work relies on a two-energy measurement scheme. It could be argued that this definition is arbitrary. A possible way to settle the controversy would be through the correspondence principle. In this work we present a semiclassical expression for the characteristic function of the distribution of work done on a system after a quench. We use the so-called dephasing representation proposed by Vanicek and Heller (2003), which is a very efficient method proposed originally to compute the fidelity. We show that in the limit of vanishing Planck constant the classical distribution is recovered. We support our results with numerical simulations on a stadium billiard.