Related papers: Comments on Extraction of Work from a Single Therm…
A bath with a negative temperature is a subject of intense debate in recent times. It raises fundamental questions not only on our understanding of negative temperature of a bath in connection with thermodynamics but also on the…
In this article, we briefly review dynamical and thermodynamical aspects of different forms of quantum motors and quantum pumps. We then extend previous results to provide new theoretical tools for a systematic study of those phenomena at…
Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…
Quantum correlation, or entanglement, is now believed to be an indispensable physical resource for certain tasks in quantum information processing, for which classically correlated states cannot be useful. Besides information processing,…
Thermodynamics is a highly successful macroscopic theory widely used across the natural sciences and for the construction of everyday devices, from car engines and fridges to power plants and solar cells. With thermodynamics predating…
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the…
We analyze the entropy production and the maximal extractable work from a squeezed thermal reservoir. The nonequilibrium quantum nature of the reservoir induces an entropy transfer with a coherent contribution while modifying its thermal…
We show that the dynamics of a driven quantum system weakly coupled to a finite reservoir can be approximated by a sequence of Landau-Zener transitions if the level spacing of the reservoir is large enough. This approximation can be…
We derive a Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation bounding the mean squared displacement of a Gaussian process with memory, driven out of equilibrium by unbalanced thermal baths and/or by external forces. Our bound is tighter with respect to…
The possibility of a controlled manipulation with molecules at the nanoscale allows us to gain net work from thermal energy, although this seems to be in contradiction to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Any manipulation, however, causes…
Understanding thermodynamics far from equilibrium at the quantum scale remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in the presence of quantum coherence. Here we develop a first-principles framework for nonequilibrium quantum…
We develop a mathematical description of the decoherence caused by "spin baths", such as nuclear spins or magnetic impurities. In contrast to the usual oscillator bath models of quantum environments, decoherence in the spin bath can occur…
The widely used linear-response (LR) theory of thermal conduction in the quantum regime rests on the yet unproven assumption, that the thermal conductivity is invariant with respect to the gauge of the energy density of the system. This…
Recent papers discussing thermodynamic processes in strongly coupled quantum systems claim a violation of Landauer's principle and imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. If true, this would have powerful consequences.…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
An increasing number of papers have appeared in recent years on decoherence in quantum gravity at the Planck energy. We discuss the meaning of decoherence in quantum gravity starting from the common notion that quantum gravity is a theory…
We consider a quasi-probability distribution of work for an isolated quantum system coupled to the energy-storage device given by the ideal weight. Specifically, we analyze a trade-off between changes in average energy and changes in…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
Using flow equations, equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics of a two-level system are investigated, which couples via non-commuting components to two independent oscillator baths. In equilibrium the two-level energy splitting is…
The consistent definition of the thermodynamic functions of small open quantum systems in contact with an environment in equilibrium with a heat bath has been the subject of many debates in the quantum community. In the present work we…