Related papers: Complete positivity and thermodynamics in a driven…
Completely positive trace preserving maps are essential for the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. The dynamics of quantum systems, correlated with their environments, are in general not described by such maps. We explore how…
We investigate the connection between recent results in quantum thermodynamics and fluctuation relations by adopting a fully quantum mechanical description of thermodynamics. By including a work system whose energy is allowed to fluctuate,…
We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…
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…
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…
Thermodynamics entails a set of mathematical conditions on quantum Markovian dynamics. In particular, strict energy conservation between the system and environment implies that the dissipative dynamical map commutes with the unitary system…
We consider a two-dimensional quantum control system evolving under an entropy-increasing irreversible dynamics in the semigroup form. Considering a phenomenological approach to the dynamics, we show that the accessibility property of the…
An attempt toward the operational formulation of quantum thermodynamics is made by employing the recently proposed operations forming positive operator-valued measures for generating thermodynamic processes. The quantity of heat as well as…
A version of the second law of thermodynamics states that one cannot lower the energy of an isolated system by a cyclic operation. We prove this law without introducing statistical ensembles and by resorting only to quantum mechanics. We…
Criteria for distillability, and the property of having a positive partial transpose, are introduced for states of general bipartite quantum systems. The framework is sufficiently general to include systems with an infinite number of…
We consider continuously monitored quantum systems and introduce definitions of work and heat along individual quantum trajectories that are valid for coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates. We use these quantities to extend the…
Control of open quantum systems is an essential ingredient to the realization of contemporary quantum science and technology. We demonstrate such control by employing a thermodynamically consistent framework, taking into account the fact…
We improve on our version of the second law of thermodynamics as a deterministic theorem for quantum spin systems in two basic aspects. The first concerns the general statement of the second law: spontaneous changes in an adiabatically…
In relation with experiments on correlated kaons at phi-factories, it is shown that the request of complete positivity is necessary in any physically consistent description of neutral kaons as open quantum systems.
The second law of classical thermodynamics, based on the positivity of the entropy production, only holds for deterministic processes. Therefore the Second Law in stochastic quantum thermodynamics may not hold. By making a fundamental…
We take the perspective of open quantum systems and examine from their nonequilibrium dynamics the conditions when the physical quantities, their relations and the laws of thermodynamics become well defined and viable for quantum many body…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
We apply advanced methods of control theory to open quantum systems and we determine finite-time processes which are optimal with respect to thermodynamic performances. General properties and necessary conditions characterizing optimal…
Complete positivity is a ubiquitous assumption in the study of quantum systems interacting with the environment, despite repeated efforts to point out that the assumption is not empirically justified. It will be shown that Hamiltonian…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…