Related papers: Thermodynamic processes generated by a class of co…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…
Temperature is usually defined for physical systems at thermal equilibrium. Nevertheless one may wonder if it would be possible to attribute a meaningful notion of temperature to an arbitrary quantum state, beyond simply the thermal (Gibbs)…
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…
We define thermodynamic configurations and identify two primitives of discrete quantum processes between configurations for which heat and work can be defined in a natural way. This allows us to uncover a general second law for any discrete…
We present a new proposal for distinguishing heat from work based on a control-theoretic observability decomposition. We derive a Hermitian operator representing instantaneous dissipation of observable energy, and suggest a generalization…
We study first-order phase transitions in a two-temperature system, where due to the time-scale separation all the basic thermodynamical quantities (free energy, entropy, etc) are well-defined. The sign of the latent heat is found to be…
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…
The variant of quasiclassical (half-quantum) theory of gravity in strong gravitational field is presented. The exact solution of the problem of the renormalized energy-momentum tensor calculation is performed in terms of non-local…
Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
This thesis is devoted to the theoretical study of slow thermodynamic processes in non-equilibrium stochastic systems. Its main result is a physically and mathematically consistent construction of relevant thermodynamic quantities in the…
We derive a general quantum exchange fluctuation theorem for multipartite systems with arbitrary coupling strengths by taking into account the informational contribution of the back-action of the quantum measurements, which contributes to…
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. Of particular practical relevance…
We improve on our version of the second law of thermodynamics as a deterministic theorem for quantum spin systems in two basic aspects. The first concerns the general statement of the second law: spontaneous changes in an adiabatically…
Small spin systems at the interface between analytical studies and experimental application have been intensively studied in recent decades. The spin ring consisting of four spins with uniform antiferromagnetic Heisenberg interaction is an…
Given a thermodynamic process which carries a system from one equilibrium state to another, we construct a quantity whose average, over an ensemble of microscopic realizations of the process, depends only on these end states, even if at…
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…
A key objective in nuclear and high-energy physics is to describe nonequilibrium dynamics of matter, e.g., in the early universe and in particle colliders, starting from the Standard Model. Classical-computing methods, via the framework of…
By numerically exact calculations of spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg models on small clusters, we demonstrate that quantum entanglement between subsystems $A$ and $B$ in a pure ground state of a whole system $A+B$ can induce thermal…