Related papers: The extraction of work from quantum coherence
In quantum thermodynamics, the decomposition of energy exchanges into heat and work remains an open problem beyond weak-coupling and slow-driving regimes. Recent formulations have shown that quantum coherence introduces additional energy…
We investigate manipulations of pure quantum states under incoherent or strictly incoherent operations assisted by a coherence battery, that is, a storage device whose degree of coherence is allowed to fluctuate in the process. This leads…
The efficiency of macroscopic heat engines is restricted by the second law of thermodynamics. They can reach at most the efficiency of a Carnot engine. In contrast, heat currents in mesoscopic heat engines show fluctuations. Thus, there is…
Time evolution operator in quantum mechanics can be changed into a statistical operator by a Wick rotation. This strict relation between statistical mechanics and quantum evolution can reveal deep results when the thermodynamic limit is…
A long standing open problem whether a heat engine with finite power achieves the Carnot efficiency is investigated. We rigorously prove a general trade-off inequality on thermodynamic efficiency and time interval of a cyclic process with…
The key question of this paper is whether work can be extracted from a heat engine by using purely quantum mechanical information. If the answer is yes, what is its mathematical formula? First, by using a bipartite memory we show that the…
Recent studies have developed fundamental limitations on nanoscale thermodynamics, in terms of a set of independent free energy relations. Here we show that free energy relations cannot properly describe quantum coherence in thermodynamic…
Of indisputable relevance for non-equilibrium thermodynamics, fluctuations theorems have been generalized to the framework of quantum thermodynamics, with the notion of work playing a key role in such contexts. The typical approach consists…
We study the thermodynamics of a quantum measurement-powered engine that converts energy injected by measurement backaction into work. We consider an engine with a finite-dimensional working substance, driven purely by quantum measurements,…
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…
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…
It is an established fact that quantum coherences have thermodynamic value. The natural question arises, whether other genuine quantum properties such as entanglement can also be exploited to extract thermodynamic work. In the present…
Quantum heat engines (QHE) are thermal machines where the working substance is quantum. In the extreme case the working medium can be a single particle or a few level quantum system. The study of QHE has shown a remarkable similarity with…
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…
The resource-theoretic approach to quantum thermodynamics assumes complete knowledge of the thermal equilibrium against which thermodynamic resources are defined. In practice, however, this state is determined by the system Hamiltonian and…
The difference between quantum isoenergetic process and quantum isothermal process comes from the violation of the law of equipartition of energy in the quantum regime. To reveal an important physical meaning of this fact, here we study a…
This paper considers work extraction from a quantum system to a work storage system (or weight) following reference [1]. An alternative approach is here developed that relies on the comparison of subspace dimensions without a need to…
This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…
We show that the dynamics of a driven quantum system weakly coupled to a finite reservoir can be approximated by a sequence of Landau-Zener transitions if the level spacing of the reservoir is large enough. This approximation can be…
Incorporating time into thermodynamics allows addressing the tradeoff between efficiency and power. A qubit engine serves as a toy model to study this tradeoff from first principles, based on the quantum theory of open systems. We study the…