Related papers: Microscopic Work Distribution of Small System in Q…
Statistical physics in equilibrium grants us one of its most powerful tools: the equipartition principle. It states that the degrees of freedom of a mechanical system act as a thermometer: temperature is equal to the mean variance of their…
We consider the basic, thermodynamic properties of an elementary micro-machine operating at colloidal length scales. In particular, we track and analyse the driven stochastic motion of a carefully designed micro-propeller rotating unevenly…
The minimal-coupling quantum heat engine is a thermal machine consisting of an explicit energy storage system, heat baths, and a working body, which alternatively couples to subsystems through discrete strokes -- energy-conserving two-body…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
For driven open systems in contact with multiple heat reservoirs, we find the marginal distributions of work or heat do not satisfy any fluctuation theorem, but only the joint distribution of work and heat satisfies a family of fluctuation…
We extend Jarzynski's work relation and the second law of thermodynamics to a heat conducting system which is operated by an external agent. These extensions contain a new non equilibrium contribution expressed as the violation of the…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
We obtain macroscopic isothermal thermodynamic transformations by space-time scalings of a microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics in contact with a heat bath. The microscopic dynamics is given by a chain of anharmonic oscillators subject to a…
Isothermal processes of a finitely extended, driven quantum system in contact with an infinite heat bath are studied from the point of view of quantum statistical mechanics. Notions like heat flux, work and entropy are defined for…
When a thermally isolated system performs a driving process in the quasistatic regime, its variation of average energy is equal to its quasistatic work. Even though presenting this simple definition, few attempts have been made to describe…
We study the work cost of processes in quantum fields without the need of projective measurements, which are always ill defined in quantum field theory. Inspired by interferometry schemes, we propose a work distribution that generalizes the…
Information-theoretic approaches provide a promising avenue for extending the laws of thermodynamics to the nanoscale. Here, we provide a general fundamental lower limit, valid for systems with an arbitrary Hamiltonian and in contact with…
We reassess the concept of transition at minimum work in classical stochastic finite-time thermodynamics, when the system dynamics is modelled by a diffusion process. We show that a well-posed formulation of the optimal control problem…
Thermodynamics is the phenomenological theory of heat and work. Here we analyze to what extent quantum thermodynamic relations are immune to the underlying mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. As a main result, we show that the…
Work is one of the most basic notion in statistical mechanics, with work fluctuation theorems being one central topic in nanoscale thermodynamics. With Hamiltonian chaos commonly thought to provide a foundation for classical statistical…
We demonstrate that the Gibbs-Shannon entropy is applicable to non-equilibrium systems of any size and boundary conditions. The change in microscopic entropy can be attributed to the stochastic nature of dynamic processes and to the…
In this Letter we investigate the concept of quantum work and its measurability from the viewpoint of quantum measurement theory. Very often, quantum work and fluctuation theorems are discussed in the framework of projective two-point…
We study the quantum fluctuation theorem in the one-time measurement (OTM) scheme, where the work distribution of the backward process has been lacking and which is considered to be more informative than the two-time measurement (TTM)…
In the standard framework of thermodynamics the work produced or consumed in a process is a random variable whose average value is bounded by the change in the free energy of the system. This work is calculated without regard for the size…
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,…