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According to the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the definitions of work and heat, microscopic expressions for the non-equilibrium entropy production have been achieved. Recently, a redefinition of heat has been presented in…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
Accurately describing work extraction from a quantum system is a central objective for the extension of thermodynamics to individual quantum systems. The concepts of work and heat are surprisingly subtle when generalizations are made to…
A first principle reciprocating quantum refrigerator is investigated with the purpose of determining the limitations of cooling to absolute zero. We find that if the energy spectrum of the working medium possesses an uncontrollable gap,…
Heat exchanges are the essence of Thermodynamics. In order to investigate non-equilibrium effects like quantum coherence and correlations in heat flows we introduce the concept of apparent temperature. Its definition is based on the…
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…
Fluctuation theorems and the second law of thermodynamics are powerful relations constraining the behavior of out-of-equilibrium systems. While there exist generalizations of these relations to feedback controlled quantum systems, their…
Quantum measurement is ultimately a physical process, resulting from an interaction between the measured system and a measuring apparatus. Considering the physical process of measurement within a thermodynamic context naturally raises the…
We study dynamic cooling, where an externally driven two-level system is cooled via reservoir, a quantum system with initial canonical equilibrium state. We obtain explicitly the minimal possible temperature $T_{\rm min}>0$ reachable for…
We study the transition probabilities of a two-point measurement on a quantum system, initially prepared in a thermal state. We find two independent constraints on the difference between transition probabilities when the system is prepared…
The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…
The minimal work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is studied…
Operational quantum stochastic thermodynamics is a recently proposed theory to study the thermodynamics of open systems based on the rigorous notion of a quantum stochastic process or quantum causal model. In there, a stochastic trajectory…
We investigate the operation of a qubit as a quantum thermal device within the repeated interaction framework, allowing for strong system-bath coupling and finite interaction times. We analyze two minimal models: an alternating-coupling…
Thermodynamics is a highly successful macroscopic theory widely used across the natural sciences and for the construction of everyday devices, from car engines and fridges to power plants and solar cells. With thermodynamics predating…
The minimal-coupling quantum heat engine is a thermal machine consisting of an explicit energy storage system, heat baths, and a working body, which alternatively couples to subsystems through discrete strokes -- energy-conserving two-body…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
Measuring the local temperature of nanoscale systems out of equilibrium has emerged as a new tool to study local heating effects and other local thermal properties of systems driven by external fields. Although various experimental…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
Simulations are performed of a small quantum system interacting with a quantum environment. The system consists of various initial states of two harmonic oscillators coupled to give normal modes. The environment is "designed" by its level…