Related papers: Thermal machines beyond the weak coupling regime
We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive…
Work and quantum correlations are two fundamental resources in thermodynamics and quantum information theory. In this work we study how to use correlations among quantum systems to optimally store work. We analyse this question for isolated…
The interplay between quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence, and classical notions, such as energy, is a subtle topic at the forefront of quantum thermodynamics. The traditional Carnot argument limits the conversion of heat to…
Quantum correlation, or entanglement, is now believed to be an indispensable physical resource for certain tasks in quantum information processing, for which classically correlated states cannot be useful. Besides information processing,…
Quantum systems strongly coupled to many-body systems equilibrate to the reduced state of a global thermal state, deviating from the local thermal state of the system as it occurs in the weak-coupling limit. Taking this insight as a…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
We consider locally thermal states (for two qubits) with certain amount of quantum entanglement present between them. Unlike previous protocols we show how work can be extracted by performing local unitary operations on this state by…
Quantum thermal states are known to be passive, as required by the second law of thermodynamics. This paper investigates the potential for work extraction by coupling a thermal bath to a qubit of either spin, fermionic, or topological type,…
The stationary state of a quantum particle strongly coupled to a quantum thermal bath is known to be non-gibbsian, due to entanglement with the bath. For harmonic potentials, where the system can be described by effective temperatures,…
Recently proposed information-exploiting systems designed to extract work from a single heat bath utilize temporal correlations on an input tape. We study how enforcing time-continuous dynamics, which is necessary to ensure the device is…
Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…
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…
We propose a new form of the Second Law inequality that defines a tight bound for extractable work from the non-equilibrium quantum state. In classical thermodynamics, the optimal work is given by the difference of free energy, what…
We revisit the problem of work extraction from a system in contact with a heat bath to a work storage system, and the reverse problem of state formation from a thermal system state in single-shot quantum thermodynamics. A physically…
We show that frequent nondemolition measurements of a quantum system immersed in a thermal bath allow the extraction of work in a closed cycle from the system-bath interaction (correlation) energy, a hitherto unexploited work resource. It…
Quantum heat machines (QHMs) models generally assume a weak coupling to the baths. This supposition is grounded in the separability principle between systems and allows the derivation of the evolution equation for this case. In the weak…
It is often claimed, that from a quantum system of d levels, and entropy S and heat bath of temperature T one can draw kT(ln d -S) amount of work. However, the usual arguments based on Szilard engine are not fully rigorous. Here we prove…
Motivated by the recent interest in thermodynamics of micro- and mesoscopic quantum systems we study the maximal amount of work that can be reversibly extracted from a quantum system used to store temporarily energy. Guided by the notion of…