Related papers: Quantum nonequilibrium equalities with absolute ir…
Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of isolated quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic…
We analyze underdamped Brownian motion in non-isothermal media with quadratic, linear, and piecewise-constant temperature profiles. Exact identities for entropy production and entropy extraction are derived, addressing whether a vanishing…
The unavoidable irreversible losses of power in a heat engine are found to be of quantum origin. Following thermodynamic tradition a model quantum heat engine operating by the Otto cycle is analyzed. The working medium of the model is…
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…
Generic far-away-from-equilibrium many-body dynamics involve entropy production, and hence are thermodynamically irreversible. Near quantum critical points, an emergent conformal symmetry can impose strong constraints on entropy production…
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…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
We argue that it is fundamentally impossible to recover information about quantum superpositions when a system has interacted with a sufficiently large number of degrees of freedom of the environment. This is due to the fact that gravity…
In both classical and quantum physics, irreversible processes are described by maps that contract the space of states. The change in volume has often been taken as a natural quantifier of the amount of irreversibility. In Bayesian…
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…
This chapter deals with our recent attempt to extend the notion of equilibrium (EQ) entropy to nonequilibrium (NEQ) systems so that it can also capture memory effects. This is done by enlarging the equilibrium state space by introducing…
The entropy production rate is a key quantity in non-equilibrium thermodynamics of both classical and quantum processes. No universal theory of entropy production is available to date, which hinders progress towards its full grasping. By…
When quantum systems interact with the environment they lose their quantum properties, such as coherence. Quantum erasure makes it possible to restore coherence in a system by measuring its environment, but accessing the whole of it may be…
The fact that the quantum relative entropy is non-increasing with respect to quantum physical evolutions lies at the core of many optimality theorems in quantum information theory and has applications in other areas of physics. In this…
Nonequilibrium steady-state currents, unlike their equilibrium counterparts, continuously dissipate energy into their physical surroundings leading to entropy production and time-reversal symmetry breaking. This letter discusses these…
Irreversibility is often considered to characterize measurements in quantum mechanics. Fundamental problems with this characterization are addressed. First, whether a measurement is made in quantum mechanics is an arbitrary decision on the…
When a physical system is put in contact with a very large thermal bath, it undergoes a dissipative (i.e., an apparently irreversible) process that leads to thermal equilibrium. This dynamical process can be described fully within quantum…
For a certain class of isolated quantum systems, we report the existence of irreversible processes in which the energy is not dissipated. After a closed cycle in which the initial energy distribution is fully recovered, the expectation…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
Clausius inequality has deep implications for reversibility and the arrow of time. Quantum theory is able to extend this result for closed systems by inspecting the trajectory of the density matrix on its manifold. Here we show that this…