Related papers: Second Law of Thermodynamics with Discrete Quantum…
Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
Sadi Carnot's theorem regarding the maximum efficiency of heat engines is considered to be of fundamental importance in thermodynamics. This theorem famously states that the maximum efficiency depends only on the temperature of the heat…
Recently Sagawa and Ueda [Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 080403 (2008)] derived a bound on the work that can be extracted from a quantum system with the use of feedback control. They left open the question of whether this bound could be achieved for…
Quantum systems strongly coupled to many-body systems equilibrate to the reduced state of a global thermal state, deviating from the local thermal state of the system as it occurs in the weak-coupling limit. Taking this insight as a…
We prove the second law of thermodynamics and the nonequilibirum fluctuation theorem for pure quantum states.The entire system obeys reversible unitary dynamics, where the initial state of the heat bath is not the canonical distribution but…
Quantum thermal states are known to be passive, as required by the second law of thermodynamics. This paper investigates the potential for work extraction by coupling a thermal bath to a qubit of either spin, fermionic, or topological type,…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
The thermodynamic properties of quantum heat engines are stochastic owing to the presence of thermal and quantum fluctuations. We here experimentally investigate the efficiency and nonequilibrium entropy production statistics of a spin-1/2…
According to classical Boltzmannian thermodynamics, the efficiency of a cyclic machine is strictly lower than one. Such a result is a straightforward consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics. Recent advances in the study of the…
The thermodynamic uncertainty relation posits that higher thermodynamic costs are essential for a system to function with greater precision. Recent discussions have expanded thermodynamic uncertainty relations beyond classical…
The laws of thermodynamics apply equally well to quantum systems as to classical systems, and because of this quantum effects do not change the fundamental thermodynamic efficiency of isothermal refrigerators or engines. We show that,…
One of the principal objectives of quantum thermodynamics is to explore quantum effects and their potential beneficial role in thermodynamic tasks like work extraction or refrigeration. So far, even though several papers have already shown…
The performance characteristics of a heat rectifier and a heat pump are studied in a non Markovian framework. The device is constructed from a molecule connected to a hot and cold reservoir. The heat baths are modelled using the stochastic…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some…
The first law of thermodynamics restates the law of conservation of energy. It partitions the change in energy of a system into two pieces, heat and work. While there is no ambiguity to define heat and work in classical thermodynamics,…
It has long been known that, fundamentally different from a large body of rarefied gas, when a Knudsen gas is immersed in a thermal bath, it may never reach thermal equilibrium. The root cause is nonchaoticity: as the particle-particle…
In the real world, one almost never knows the parameters of a thermodynamic process to infinite precision. Reflecting this, here we investigate how to extend stochastic thermodynamics to systems with uncertain parameters, including…
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like…