Related papers: Extracting work from quantum systems
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…
Work extraction from a heat engine in a cycle by a quantum mechanical device (quantum "piston") is analyzed. The standard definition of work fails in the quantum domain. The correct extractable work and its efficiency bound are shown to…
One of the fundamental questions in the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics is the role played by coherence in energetic processes that occur at the quantum level. Here, we address this issue by investigating two different quantum…
Recent years have seen an enormously revived interest in the study of thermodynamic notions in the quantum regime. This applies both to the study of notions of work extraction in thermal machines in the quantum regime, as well as to…
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…
Systems that are driven by a randomly timed, external protocol can seemingly violate the second law of thermodynamics. We show that this thermodynamic paradox is resolved if the outcome of the random time is stored in a memory device.…
An open question of fundamental importance in thermodynamics is how to describe the fluctuations of work for quantum coherent processes. In the standard approach, based on a projective energy measurement both at the beginning and at the end…
Quantum work is usually determined from two projective measurements of the energy at the beginning and at the end of a thermodynamic process. However, this paradigm cannot be considered thermodynamically consistent as it does not account…
The energy cost of erasing quantum states depends on our knowledge of the states. We show that learning algorithms can acquire such knowledge to erase many copies of an unknown state at the optimal energy cost. This is proved by showing…
We review recent work on the foundations of thermodynamics in the light of quantum information theory. We adopt a resource-theoretic perspective, wherein thermodynamics is formulated as a theory of what agents can achieve under a particular…
We establish quantum thermodynamics for open quantum systems weakly coupled to their reservoirs when the system exhibits degeneracies. The first and second law of thermodynamics are derived, as well as a finite-time fluctuation theorem for…
In this paper we give a pedagogical introduction to the ideas of quantum thermodynamics and work fluctuations, using only basic concepts from quantum and statistical mechanics. After reviewing the concept of work, as usually taught in…
We review the basic idea behind resource theories, where we quantify quantum resources by specifying a restricted class of operations. This divides the state space into various sets, including states which are free (because they can be…
We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
The validity of the Jarzynski equation for a very simple, exactly solvable quantum system is analyzed. The implications of two different definitions of work proposed in the literature are investigated. The first one derives from…
Thermodynamics is commonly presented as a theory of macroscopic systems in stable equilibrium, built upon assumptions of extensivity and scaling with system size. In this paper, we present a universal formulation of the elementary…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
Thermodynamics of the magnetic field coupled Brownian particles is studied. We show that in the presence of the magnetic field, work can be extracted from the reservoir even when the measurement operation and the potential change operation…
We determine the maximal work extractable via a cyclic Hamiltonian process from a positive-temperature ($T>0$) microcanonical state of a $N\gg 1$ spin bath. The work is much smaller than the total energy of the bath, but can be still much…