Related papers: Thermal machines beyond the weak coupling regime
The study of quantum thermodynamics is key to the development of quantum thermal machines. In contrast to most of the previous proposals based on discrete strokes, here we consider a working substance that is permanently coupled to two or…
Many work extraction or information erasure processes in the literature involve the raising and lowering of energy levels via external fields. But even if the actual system is treated quantum mechanically, the field is assumed to be…
In a PRL [1], the authors claim to show that "the Clausius inequality can be violated, and that it is even possible to extract work from a thermal bath by cyclic variations of a parameter ("perpetuum mobile"), and that the physical cause…
We consider overdamped Brownian particles with two degrees of freedom (DoF) that are confined in a time-varying quadratic potential and are in simultaneous contact with heat baths of different temperatures along the respective DoF. The…
We present quantitative relations between work and information that are valid both for finite sized and internally correlated systems as well in the thermodynamical limit. We suggest work extraction should be viewed as a game where the…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
Understanding under which conditions physical systems thermalize is a long-standing question in many-body physics. While generic quantum systems thermalize, there are known instances where thermalization is hindered, for example in…
Thermodynamics and information have intricate inter-relations. The justification of the fact that information is physical, is done by inter-linking information and thermodynamics - through Landauer's principle. This modern approach towards…
Connections between information theory and thermodynamics have proven to be very useful to establish bounding limits for physical processes. Ideas such as Landauer's erasure principle and information assisted work extraction have greatly…
We establish a rigorous connection between fundamental resource theories at the quantum scale. Correlations and entanglement constitute indispensable resources for numerous quantum information tasks. However, their establishment comes at…
Describing open quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the environment is mesoscopic, when it develops nonequilibrium features during the evolution, or when the memory effects cannot be disregarded. Here, we…
The thermodynamic properties of quantum heat engines are stochastic owing to the presence of thermal and quantum fluctuations. We here experimentally investigate the efficiency and nonequilibrium entropy production statistics of a spin-1/2…
Within the framework of microscopic thermodynamics, correlations can play a crucial role for energy extraction. Our work sheds light on this connection by demonstrating that entanglement governs the amount of extractable energy in a…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
The second law of thermodynamics states that a system in contact with a heat bath can undergo a transformation if and only if its free energy decreases. However, the "if" part of this statement is only true when the effective heat bath is…
Quantum thermodynamics can be understood as a resource theory, whereby thermal states are free and the only allowed operations are unitary transformations commuting with the total Hamiltonian of the system. Previous literature on the…
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…
We provide a characterization of energy in the form of exchanged heat and work between two interacting constituents of a closed, bipartite, correlated quantum system. By defining a binding energy we derive a consistent quantum formulation…
We consider two non-interacting systems embedded in a heat bath. If they remain dynamically independent, physical inconsistencies are avoided only if the single-system reduced dynamics is completely positive also beyond the weak-coupling…