Related papers: Heat-to-work conversion by exploiting full or part…

The Von Neumann entropy of reduced states is a measure of bipartite entanglement. Despite its name, the entanglement entropy cannot by itself be used as a resource for creating thermodynamic heat flows. In order to extract heat from an…

The optimal efficiency of quantum (or classical) heat engines whose heat baths are $n$-particle systems is given by the information geometry and the strong large deviation. We give the optimal work extraction process as a concrete…

The first step in quantum information theory is the identification of entanglement as a valuable resource. The next step is learning how to exploit this resource efficiently. We learn how to exploit entanglement efficiently by applying…

The temperature dependence of the dielectric permittivity is taken into account to study the energy change in a capacitor that follows a cycle between a cold and a hot thermal reservoirs. There is a net energy gain in the process that, in…

Common intuition tells us that if one part of a connected system is cooled continuously, the other parts should also cool down. This intuition can be given a microscopic foundation for the case of a generic quantum system coupled to a…

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…

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…

We illustrate recent results concerning the validity of the work fluctuation theorem in open quantum systems [M. Campisi, P. Talkner, and P. H\"{a}nggi, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 102}, 210401 (2009)], by applying them to a solvable model of an…

This paper is about quantum heat defined as the change in energy of a bath during a process. The presentation takes into account recent developments in classical strong-coupling thermodynamics, and addresses a version of quantum heat which…

We consider a collision between a moving particle and a fixed system, each having internal degrees of freedom. We identify the regime where the motion of the particle acts as a work source for the joint internal system, leading to energy…

We define and analyse the concept of entanglement production during the evolution of a general quantum mechanical dissipative system. While it is important to minimise entropy production in order to achieve thermodynamical efficiency,…

The thermodynamic entropy of an isolated system is given by its von Neumann entropy. Over the last few years, there is an intense activity to understand thermodynamic entropy from the principles of quantum mechanics. More specifically, is…

We consider continuously monitored quantum systems and introduce definitions of work and heat along individual quantum trajectories that are valid for coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates. We use these quantities to extend the…

How to rigorously define thermodynamic quantities such as heat, work, and internal energy in open quantum systems driven far from equilibrium remains a significant open question in quantum thermodynamics. Heat is a quantity whose…

Classical and quantum mechanics laws are rebuilt in the frame of new thermodynamics. Heat is the sum of kinetic energy, system work, and system potential of a system, while force is the heat gradients over distance. Hence, collision,…

A quantum system and a thermal bath can reach thermal equilibrium through an interaction, whereupon the system acquires the same temperature as the bath. But how does a delocalised quantum system thermalise with a bath whose local…

We investigate heat engines whose working substance is made of two coupled qubits performing a generalised Otto cycle by varying their applied magnetic field or their interaction strength during the compression and expansion strokes. During…

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 statistical mechanical description of small systems staying in thermal equilibrium with an environment can be achieved by means of the Hamiltonian of mean force. In contrast to the reduced density matrix of an open quantum system, or…

Regarded as one of the most fundamental concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, work has received well-grounded definitions within the quantum framework since the 1970s, having being successfully applied to many contexts. Recent…