Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime
Statistical Mechanics
2009-10-31 v1
Abstract
The stationary state of a quantum particle strongly coupled to a quantum thermal bath is known to be non-gibbsian, due to entanglement with the bath. For harmonic potentials, where the system can be described by effective temperatures, thermodynamic relations are shown to take a generalized Gibbsian form, that may violate the Clausius inequality. For the weakly-anharmonic case a Fokker-Planck type description is constructed. It is shown that then work can be extracted from the bath by cyclic variation of a parameter. These apparent violations of the second law are the consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the bath.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0006404,
title = {Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime},
author = {A. E. Allahverdyan and Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0006404},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
5 pages, revtex, 0 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett