Related papers: Second laws under control restrictions
Extracting useful work from quantum systems is a fundamental problem in quantum thermodynamics. In scenarios where rapid protocols are desired -- whether due to practical constraints or deliberate design choices -- a fundamental trade-off…
In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be…
We show that the maximum extractable work (ergotropy) from a quantum many-body system is constrained by local athermality of an initial state and local entropy decrease brought about by quantum operations. The obtained universal upper bound…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
Work can be extracted from a single bath beyond the limit set by the second law by performing measurement on the system and utilising the acquired information. As an example we studied a Brownian particle confined in a two dimensional…
Evaluating the maximum amount of work extractable from a nanoscale quantum system is one of the central problems in quantum thermodynamics. Previous works identified the free energy of the input state as the optimal rate of extractable work…
An apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics occurs when an atom coupled to a zero-temperature bath, being necessarily in an excited state, is used to extract work from the bath. Here the fallacy is that it takes work to couple…
Jarzynski's equality sets a strong bound on the probability of violating the second law of thermodynamics by extracting work beyond the free energy difference. We derive finite-time refinements to this bound for driven systems in contact…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
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…
Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…
We consider the task of extracting work from quantum systems in the resource theory perspective of thermodynamics, where free states are arbitrary thermal states, and allowed operations are energy conserving unitary transformations. Taking…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
The field-dependent equilibrium thermodynamics is derived with two methods: either by using the potential formalism either by the statistical method. Therefore, Pontrjagin's extremum principle of control theory is applied to an extended…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
Quantum dynamics controlled by a time-dependent coupling constant are studied. It is proven that an energy eigenstate expectation value of work done by the system in a quench process cannot exceed the work in the corresponding quasi-static…