Properties of a macroscopic system as a thermal bath

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Abstract
A macroscopic system acting as a heat reservoir affords a simplified description in terms of a collection of independent modes. Although in most cases this model is unable to account for the behavior of the macroscopic system itself, it provides a consistent desciption of the macroscopic degrees of freedom acting as a dissipation mechanism for a microscopic system. This is found to be a consequence of the statistical properties of bath quantities relevant to the dynamics of the microscopic system. Furthermore, these properties ensure that the unphysical features of the independent bath model do not affect its performance as a heat reservoir.

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