Related papers: Maximally efficient quantum thermal machines: The …

We construct a quantum critical Otto engine that is powered by finite temperature baths. We show that the work output of the engine shows universal power law behavior that depends on the critical exponents of the working medium, as well as…

In their work [J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 33, 4427 (2000)], Bender, Brody, and Meister have shown by employing a two-state model of a particle confined in the one-dimensional infinite potential well that it is possible to construct a…

The triumph of heat engines is their ability to convert the disordered energy of thermal sources into useful mechanical motion. In recent years, much effort has been devoted to generalizing thermodynamic notions to the quantum regime,…

Thermodynamics is a branch of science blessed by an unparalleled combination of generality of scope and formal simplicity. Based on few natural assumptions together with the four laws, it sets the boundaries between possible and impossible…

In 1975, Courzon and Ahlborn studied a Carnot engine with thermal losses and got an expression for its efficiency that described better the performance of actual heat machines than the traditional result due to Carnot. In their original…

We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body…

We consider a photo--Carnot engine that consists of a single--mode radiation field in an optical cavity. One the heat reservoirs is made of a beam of thermally entangled pairs of two--level atoms that interact resonantly with the cavity. We…

How much energy does a quantum computer consume? Are they more efficient than their classical counterparts? In this work, we make a step towards answering these questions. We define the energy efficiency of a quantum computer as the ratio…

Giving a universal upper bound on the power output of heat engines is a long-standing open problem. We tackle this problem for generic quantum machines in self-contained formulation by carefully including the switching process of the…

The problem of inference is applied to the process of work extraction from two constant heat capacity reservoirs, when the thermodynamic coordinates of the process are not fully specified. The information that is lacking, includes both the…

In the task of unitarily cooling a quantum system with access to a larger quantum system, known as the machine or reservoir, how does the structure of the machine impact an agent's ability to cool and the complexity of their cooling…

Heat engines extract work by running cyclically between two heat reservoirs. When the two reservoirs are thermal and at different temperatures, the maximum efficiency of the engine is given by the Carnot limit. Here we consider a quantum…

Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…

Classical thermodynamics aimed to quantify the efficiency of thermodynamic engines by bounding the maximal amount of mechanical energy produced compared to the amount of heat required. While this was accomplished early on, by Carnot and…

We consider quantum heat engines that operate between nonequilibrium stationary reservoirs. We evaluate their maximum efficiency from the positivity of the entropy production and show that it can be expressed in terms of an effective…

Computation is an input-output process, where a program encoding a problem to be solved is inserted into a machine that outputs a solution. Quantum computation conventionally relies on classical, external control outside the quantum…

We present quantum heat machines using a diatomic molecule modelled by a $q$-deformed potential as a working medium. We analyze the effect of the deformation parameter and other potential parameters on the work output and efficiency of the…

Heat is a physical manifestation of entropy, where the removal of entropy from a thermal energy reservoir permits the conversion of heat into work. This entropy transfer is facilitated by the cold thermal energy reservoir in typical heat…

A quantum engine fueled by quantum measurement is proposed. Under the finite-time adiabatic driving regime, the conversion of heat to work is realized without the compression and expansion of the resonance frequency. The work output,…

The question of whether quantum coherence is a resource beneficial or detrimental to the performance of quantum heat engines has been thoroughly studied but remains undecided. To isolate the contribution of coherence, we analyze the…