Related papers: Irreversible work and inner friction in quantum th…
Energy is often partitioned into heat and work by two independent paths corresponding to the change in the eigenenergies or the probability distributions of a quantum system. The discrepancies of the heat and work for various quantum…
A key concept in quantum thermodynamics is extractable work, which specifies the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum system. Different quantities are used to measure extractable work, the most prevalent of which are…
We study the statistics of the work done, the fluctuation relations and the irreversible entropy production in a quantum many-body system subject to the sudden quench of a control parameter. By treating the quench as a thermodynamic…
Understanding thermodynamics far from equilibrium at the quantum scale remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in the presence of quantum coherence. Here we develop a first-principles framework for nonequilibrium quantum…
A simple and effective approach to thermodynamics is suggested, which solves the major difficulties in the traditional presentation of the subject. The internal energy is introduced from the behavior of deformable bodies, whereas the…
A quantum analog of friction (understood as a completely positive, Markovian, translation-invariant and phenomenological model of dissipation) is known to be in odds with the detailed balance in the thermodynamic limit. We show that this is…
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…
Quantum thermodynamics aims at investigating both the emergence and the limits of the laws of thermodynamics from a quantum mechanical microscopic approach. In this scenario, thermodynamic processes with no heat exchange, namely, adiabatic…
Various quantum thermodynamic bounds are shown to stem from a single tighter and more general inequality, consequence of the operator concavity of the logarithmic function. Such an inequality, which we call the "thermodynamic reverse…
Quantum open systems evolve according to completely positive, trace preserving maps acting on the density operator, which can equivalently be unraveled in term of so-called quantum trajectories. These stochastic sequences of pure states…
In classical thermodynamic processes the unavoidable presence of irreversibility, quantified by the entropy production, carries two energetic footprints: the reduction of extractable work from the optimal, reversible case, and the…
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…
We consider two spin-1/2 particles with isotropic Heisenberg interaction, as the working substance of a quantum heat engine. We observe a frictional effect on the adiabatic branches of the heat cycle, which arises due to an inhomogeneous…
In Newtonian mechanics, any closed-system dynamics of a composite system in a microstate will leave all its individual subsystems in distinct microstates, however this fails dramatically in quantum mechanics due to the existence of quantum…
A fluctuation theorem for the nonequilibrium entropy production in quantum phase space is derived, which enables the consistent thermodynamic description of arbitrary quantum systems, open and closed. The new treatment naturally generalizes…
Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that…
Quantum thermodynamics allows for the interconversion of quantum coherence and mechanical work. Quantum coherence is thus a potential physical resource for quantum machines. However, formulating a general nonequilibrium thermodynamics of…
The thermodynamics of quantum systems driven out of equilibrium has attracted increasing attention in last the decade, in connection with quantum information and statistical physics, and with a focus on non-classical signatures. While a…
Using the scaling relation of the ground state quantum fidelity, we propose the most generic scaling relations of the irreversible work (the residual energy) of a closed quantum system at absolute zero temperature when one of the parameters…
Thermodynamic principles are often deceptively simple and yet surprisingly powerful. We show how a simple rule, such as the net flow of energy in and out of a moving atom under nonequilibrium steady state condition, can expose the…