Related papers: Fundamental limitations for quantum and nano therm…
Quantum thermodynamics is an emerging research field aiming to extend standard thermodynamics and non-equilibrium statistical physics to ensembles of sizes well below the thermodynamic limit, in non-equilibrium situations, and with the full…
We describe recent progress towards deriving the Fundamental Laws of thermodynamics (the 0th, 1st and 2nd Law) from nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics in simple, yet physically relevant models. Along the way, we clarify some basic…
How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…
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…
Thermodynamics is traditionally constrained to the study of macroscopic systems whose energy fluctuations are negligible compared to their average energy. Here, we push beyond this thermodynamic limit by developing a mathematical framework…
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…
The emergence of irreversibility in physical processes, despite the fundamentally reversible nature of quantum mechanics, remains an open question in physics. This thesis explores the intricate relationship between quantum mechanics and…
There are both practical and foundational motivations to consider the thermodynamics of quantum systems at small scales. Here we address the issue of autonomous quantum thermal machines that are tailored to achieve some specific…
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''.…
The purpose of this work is to discuss recent progress in deriving the fundamental laws of thermodynamics (0th, 1st and 2nd-law) from nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics. Basic thermodynamic notions are clarified and different…
Thermodynamics imposes restrictions on what state transformations are possible. In the macroscopic limit of asymptotically many independent copies of a state---as for instance in the case of an ideal gas---the possible transformations…
Quantum thermodynamics is a research field that aims at fleshing out the ultimate limits of thermodynamic processes in the deep quantum regime. A complete picture of quantum thermodynamics allows for catalysts, i.e., systems facilitating…
The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
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…
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…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
We establish the foundations of a nonequilibrium theory of quantum thermodynamics for noninteracting open quantum systems strongly coupled to their reservoirs within the framework of the nonequilibrium Green functions (NEGF). The energy of…