Related papers: Thermal machines beyond the weak coupling regime
The minimal-coupling quantum heat engine is a thermal machine consisting of an explicit energy storage system, heat baths, and a working body, which alternatively couples to subsystems through discrete strokes -- energy-conserving two-body…
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…
We examine when it is possible to locally extract energy from a bipartite quantum system in the presence of strong coupling and entanglement, a task which is expected to be restricted by entanglement in the low-energy eigenstates. We fully…
Describing the thermodynamic properties of quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the system is strongly coupled to its environment, or when memory effects cannot be neglected. Here, we address such regimes…
We consider continuously monitored quantum systems and introduce definitions of work and heat along individual quantum trajectories that are valid for coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates. We use these quantities to extend the…
We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body…
We investigate the fundamental limitations imposed by thermodynamics for creating correlations. Considering a collection of initially uncorrelated thermal quantum systems, we ask how much classical and quantum correlations can be obtained…
The presence of correlations in the input state of a non-interacting many-body quantum system can lead to an increase in the amount of work we can extract from it under global unitary processes (ergotropy). The present work explore such…
The role of quantum entanglement in thermodynamical systems remains elusive. Does entanglement result in thermodynamic advantages or does it impose fundamental limitations? Here, we unambiguously quantify the amount of heat and work in a…
We show that work can be extracted from a two-level system (spin) coupled to a bosonic thermal bath. This is possible due to different initial temperatures of the spin and the bath, both positive (no spin population inversion) and is…
Constraints on work extraction are fundamental to our operational understanding of the thermodynamics of both classical and quantum systems. In the quantum setting, finite-time control operations typically generate coherence in the…
There are both practical and foundational motivations to consider the thermodynamics of quantum systems at small scales. Here we address the issue of autonomous quantum thermal machines that are tailored to achieve some specific…
We study a chain of interacting individual quantum systems connected to heat baths at different temperatures on both ends. Starting with the two-system case, we thoroughly investigate the conditions for heat rectification (asymmetric heat…
The optimal efficiency of quantum (or classical) heat engines whose heat baths are $n$-particle systems is given by the information geometry and the strong large deviation. We give the optimal work extraction process as a concrete…
We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…
It is shown how information contained in the pairwise correlations (in general, partial) between atoms of a gas can be used to completely convert heat taken from a thermostat into mechanical work in a process of relaxation of the system to…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''.…
The heat flow between a quantum system and its reservoir is analyzed when initially both are in a separable thermal state and asymptotically approach a correlated equilibrium. General findings are illustrated for specific systems and…
Traditional quantum thermodynamic frameworks associate work to energy exchanges induced by unitary transformations generated by external controls, and heat to energy exchanges induced by bath interaction. Recently, a framework was…