Extractable Work from Correlations
Abstract
Work and quantum correlations are two fundamental resources in thermodynamics and quantum information theory. In this work we study how to use correlations among quantum systems to optimally store work. We analyse this question for isolated quantum ensembles, where the work can be naturally divided into two contributions: a local contribution from each system, and a global contribution originating from correlations among systems. We focus on the latter and consider quantum systems which are locally thermal, thus from which any extractable work can only come from correlations. We compute the maximum extractable work for general entangled states, separable states, and states with fixed entropy. Our results show that while entanglement gives an advantage for small quantum ensembles, this gain vanishes for a large number of systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.7765,
title = {Extractable Work from Correlations},
author = {Martí Perarnau-Llobet and Karen V. Hovhannisyan and Marcus Huber and Paul Skrzypczyk and Nicolas Brunner and Antonio Acín},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.7765},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5+6 pages; 1 figure. Some minor changes, close to published version