Related papers: A sufficient set of experimentally implementable t…
Small quantum systems non-weakly coupled to a bath become in the quantum regime surrounded by a cloud of photons or phonons, which modifies their thermodynamic behavior. Exactly solvable examples are the Brownian motion of a quantum…
We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…
Quantum thermodynamics supplies a consistent description of quantum heat engines and refrigerators up to the level of a single few level system coupled to the environment. Once the environment is split into three;a hot, cold and work…
The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
We argue that thermal machines can be understood from the perspective of `virtual qubits' at `virtual temperatures': The relevant way to view the two heat baths which drive a thermal machine is as a composite system. Virtual qubits are…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
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…
Almost all processes -- highly correlated, weakly correlated, or correlated not at all---exhibit statistical fluctuations. Often physical laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, address only typical realizations -- as highlighted by…
The quantum thermodynamic behavior of small systems is investigated in presence of finite quantum dissipation. We consider the archetype cases of a damped harmonic oscillator and a free quantum Brownian particle. A main finding is that…
The energy conversion efficiency of far-from-equilibrium systems is generally limited by irreversible thermodynamic fluxes that make contact with different heat baths. For complex systems, the states of the maximum efficiency and the…
Quantum technologies require pure states, which are often generated by extreme refrigeration. Heat-bath algorithmic cooling is the theoretically optimal refrigeration technique: it shuttles entropy from a multiparticle system to a thermal…
In this review the debated rapport between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is addressed in the framework of the theory of periodically-driven/controlled quantum-thermodynamic machines. The basic model studied here is that of a…
Several models of quantum open systems are known at present to violate, according to principles of the standard quantum theory of open systems, the second law of thermodynamics. Here, a new and rather trivial model of another type is…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
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 present a model for an autonomous quantum thermal machine comprised of two qubits capable of manipulating and even amplifying the local coherence in a non-degenerate external system. The machine uses only thermal resources, namely,…