Related papers: Second laws under control restrictions
The classical thermodynamic laws fail to capture the behavior of systems with energy Hamiltonian which is an explicit function of the temperature. Such Hamiltonian arises, for example, in modeling information processing systems, like…
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 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…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic observables, such as heat and work, contain relevant information on the underlying physical process. These fluctuations are however not taken into account in the traditional laws of thermodynamics. While the…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
Interactions of quantum systems with their environment play a crucial role in resource-theoretic approaches to thermodynamics in the microscopic regime. Here, we analyze the possible state transitions in the presence of "small" heat baths…
Quantum thermodynamics investigates how robust the second law of thermodynamics serves as the unique fundamental law in the small quantum world. To tackle this problem, the quantum coherence constitutes a major difficulty of investigations,…
We show that the second law of thermodynamics poses a restriction on how well we can discriminate between quantum states. By examining an ideal gas with a quantum internal degree of freedom undergoing a cycle based on a proposal by Asher…
Free energy fixes the maximum work of a thermodynamic process once the state and Hamiltonian are specified. A work-extraction task asks a different question: how much average work can a single device realize across several preparations and…
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some…
We consider overdamped physical systems evolving under a feedback-controlled fluctuating potential and in contact with a thermal bath at temperature $T$. A Markovian description of the dynamics, which keeps only the last value of the…
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
In this paper I apply newly-proposed information-theoretic principles to thermodynamic work extraction. I show that if it is possible to extract work deterministically from a physical system prepared in any one of a set of states, then…
The second law of thermodynamics constitutes a fundamental principle of physics, precluding the existence of perpetual motion machines and providing a natural definition of the arrow of time. Its scope extends across virtually all areas of…
In this paper, we identify a class of time-varying port-Hamiltonian systems that is suitable for studying problems at the intersection of statistical mechanics and control of physical systems. Those port-Hamiltonian systems are able to…
We use rigorous non-equilibrium thermodynamic arguments to prove (i) the residual entropy of any system is bounded below by the experimentally (calorimetrically) determined absolute temperature entropy, which itself is bounded below by the…
Fundamental limits on the controllability of physical systems are discussed in the light of information theory. It is shown that the second law of thermodynamics, when generalized to include information, sets absolute limits to the minimum…
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…