Related papers: Heat engine driven by purely quantum information

A quantum heat engine (QHE) based on the interaction driving of a many-particle working medium is introduced. The cycle alternates isochoric heating and cooling strokes with both interaction-driven processes that are simultaneously…

Heat engines constitute the major building blocks of modern technologies. However, conventional heat engines with higher power yield lesser efficiency and vice versa and respect various power-efficiency trade-off relations. This is also…

We describe how electromagnetically induced transparency may be used to construct a non-traditional near-ideal quantum heat engine as constrained by the Second Law. The engine is pumped by a thermal reservoir that may be either hotter or…

Performance of nano- and micro-scale heat engines can be improved with a help from quantum mechanical phenomena. Recently, heat reservoirs with quantum coherence have been proposed to enhance engine performance beyond the Carnot limit even…

The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…

For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…

The second law of thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous heat from a cold to a hot body. However, it has been theoretically and experimentally shown that energy can flow from a cold to a hot body if the bodies are initially correlated. We…

Quantum Szilard engine constitutes an adequate interplay of thermodynamics, information theory and quantum mechanics. Szilard engines are in general operated by a Maxwell's Demon where Landauer's principle resolves the apparent paradoxes.…

The Szilard engine is the simplest possible engine, composed only of one or more particles in a box. The box is then immersed in a heat bath and partitioned into two parts by a wall. It is known that in the cold temperature limit, one may…

The separation of internal energy into heat and work in quantum thermodynamics is a controversial issue for a long time, and we revisit and solve this problem in this work. It is shown that the Hamiltonian plays dual roles for a quantum…

Heat engines convert thermal energy into mechanical work both in the classical and quantum regimes. However, quantum theory offers genuine nonclassical forms of energy, different from heat, which so far have not been exploited in cyclic…

We study the mechanical performance of quantum rotor heat engines in terms of common notions of work using two prototypical models: a mill driven by the heat flow from a hot to a cold mode, and a piston driven by the alternate heating and…

In a recently published letter [S. W. Kim, T. Sagawa, S. DeLiberato, and M. Ueda, PRL 106, 070401 (2011)] the influence of particle statistics on extractable work in the Szilard engine was discussed. We point out that the expressions given…

The fundamentals of a quantum heat engine are derived from first principles. The study is based on the equation of motion of a minimum set of operators which is then used to define the state of the system. The relation between the quantum…

The Szilard engine stands as a compelling illustration of the intricate interplay between information and thermodynamics. While at thermodynamic equilibrium, the apparent breach of the second law of thermodynamics was reconciled by Landauer…

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…

Quantum cycles in established heat engines can be modeled with various quantum systems as working substances. For example, a heat engine can be modeled with an infinite potential well as the working substance to determine the efficiency and…

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…

Extending the quantum formulation of [Phys. Rev. X 3, 041003 (2013)] to a more general setting for studying the thermodynamics of information processing including initial correlations, we generalize the second law of thermodynamics to…

Landauer's erasure principle is a cornerstone of thermodynamics and information theory. According to this principle, erasing information incurs a minimum energy cost. Recently, Vaccaro and Barnett [Proc. R. Soc {\bf 467}, 1770 (2011)]…