Related papers: Comments on Extraction of Work from a Single Therm…
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,…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
In a report published in Science, Scully et al propose to generate "phaseonium", and "extract work from a single heat bath via vanishing coherence" [1]. On the basis of the laws of physics, such a proposal is futile for at least two…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
Recently Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0006404) argued that the second law of thermodynamics may be violated in a quantum system as a "consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the…
The interplay between quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence, and classical notions, such as energy, is a subtle topic at the forefront of quantum thermodynamics. The traditional Carnot argument limits the conversion of heat to…
In our recent letter [1] we discussed that thermodynamics is violated in quantum Brownian motion beyond the weak coupling limit. In his comment, Tasaki [2] derives an inequality for the relative entropy and claims, without making any…
How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…
We show that frequent nondemolition measurements of a quantum system immersed in a thermal bath allow the extraction of work in a closed cycle from the system-bath interaction (correlation) energy, a hitherto unexploited work resource. It…
The Brownian motion of a quantum particle in a harmonic confining potential and coupled to a harmonic quantum thermal bath is exactly solvable. It is shown that at low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
We propose a new form of the Second Law inequality that defines a tight bound for extractable work from the non-equilibrium quantum state. In classical thermodynamics, the optimal work is given by the difference of free energy, what…
Thomson's formulation of the second law - no work can be extracted from a system coupled to a bath through a cyclic process - is believed to be a fundamental principle of nature. For the equilibrium situation a simple proof is presented,…
We consider the Non-Equilibrium Steady State induced by two infinite quantum thermal reservoirs at different temperatures and derive an inequality giving the upper bound of the work extracted by cyclic operations. This upper bound tends to…
Small quantum systems non-weakly coupled to a bath become in the quantum regime surrounded by a cloud of photons or phonons, which modifies their thermodynamic behavior. Exactly solvable examples are the Brownian motion of a quantum…
We initially prepare a quantum linear oscillator weakly coupled to a bath in equilibrium at an arbitrary temperature. We disturb this system by varying a Hamiltonian parameter of the coupled oscillator, namely, either its spring constant or…
Non-equilibrium effects may have a profound impact on the performance of thermal devices performing thermodynamic tasks such as refrigeration or heat pumping. The possibility of enhancing the performance of thermodynamic operations by means…
We show that work can be extracted from a two-level system (spin) coupled to a bosonic thermal bath. This is possible due to different initial temperatures of the spin and the bath, both positive (no spin population inversion) and is…
Constraints on work extraction are fundamental to our operational understanding of the thermodynamics of both classical and quantum systems. In the quantum setting, finite-time control operations typically generate coherence in the…
Non-equilibrium states of quantum systems in contact with thermal baths help telling environments with different temperatures or different statistics apart. We extend these studies to a more generic problem that consists in discriminating…