Related papers: Work extraction and thermodynamics for individual …
How should one define thermodynamic quantities (internal energy, work, heat, etc.) for quantum systems coupled to their environments strongly? We examine three (classically equivalent) definitions of a quantum system's internal energy under…
The quantum analog of Carnot cycles in few-particle systems consists of two quantum adiabatic steps and two isothermal steps. This construction is formally justified by use of a minimum work principle. It is then shown, without relying on…
Quantum thermodynamics investigates how robust the second law of thermodynamics serves as the unique fundamental law in the small quantum world. To tackle this problem, the quantum coherence constitutes a major difficulty of investigations,…
At non-zero temperature classical systems exhibit statistical fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities arising from the variation of the system's initial conditions and its interaction with the environment. The fluctuating work, for…
Engines are systems and devices that convert one form of energy into another, typically into a more useful form that can perform work. In the classical setup, physical, chemical, and biological engines largely involve the conversion of heat…
Of indisputable relevance for non-equilibrium thermodynamics, fluctuations theorems have been generalized to the framework of quantum thermodynamics, with the notion of work playing a key role in such contexts. The typical approach consists…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
A unified view on macroscopic thermodynamics and quantum transport is presented. Thermodynamic processes with an exchange of energy between two systems necessarily involve the flow of other balanceable quantities. These flows are first…
We introduce a thermodynamic work extraction task that describes the energy storage enhancement of quantum systems, which is naturally related to quantum battery's charging process. This task induces majorisation-like conditions that…
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…
We consider work extraction from $N$ copies of a quantum system. When the same work-extraction process is implemented on each copy, the relative size of fluctuations is expected to decay as $1/\sqrt{N}$. Here, we consider protocols where…
We demonstrate that irreversibility arises from the principle of microscopic reversibility and the presence of memory in the time evolution of a single copy of a system driven by a protocol. We introduce microscopic reversibility by using…
We introduce an alternative way to understand the decomposition of a quantum system into interacting parts and show that it is natural in several physical models. This enables us to define a reduced density operator for a working system…
The laws of thermodynamics allow work extraction from a single heat bath provided that the entropy decrease of the bath is compensated for by another part of the system. We propose a thermodynamic quantum engine that exploits this principle…
We present a rigorous approach, based on the concept of continuous thermomajorisation, to algorithmically characterise the full set of energy occupations of a quantum system accessible from a given initial state through weak interactions…
A general quantum theory encompassing Mechanics, Thermodynamics and irreversible dynamics is presented in two parts. The first part is concerned exclusively with the description of the states of any individual physical system. It is based…
The possibility of stating the second law of thermodynamics in terms of the increasing behaviour of a physical property establishes a connection between that branch of physics and the theory of algebraic inequalities. We use this connection…
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 present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
The second law of thermodynamics for adiabatic operations -- constraints on state transitions in closed systems under external control -- is one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics. On the other hand, it is recently established…