English

Most energetic passive states

Quantum Physics 2015-11-04 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Passive states are defined as those states that do not allow for work extraction in a cyclic (unitary) process. Within the set of passive states, thermal states are the most stable ones: they maximize the entropy for a given energy, and similarly they minimize the energy for a given entropy. Here we find the passive states lying in the other extreme, i.e., those that maximize the energy for a given entropy, which we show also minimize the entropy when the energy is fixed. These extremal properties make these states useful to obtain fundamental bounds for the thermodynamics of finite-dimensional quantum systems, which we show in several scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.07311,
  title  = {Most energetic passive states},
  author = {Martí Perarnau-Llobet and Karen V. Hovhannisyan and Marcus Huber and Paul Skrzypczyk and Jordi Tura and Antonio Acín},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07311},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figures; published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:38:07.441Z