Related papers: From single-shot to general work extraction with b…
The characteristic function for the joint measurement of the changes of two commuting observables upon an external forcing of a quantum system is derived. In particular, the statistics of the internal energy, the exchanged heat and the work…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
In a generalized framework for the Landauer erasure protocol, we study bounds on the heat dissipated in typical nonequilibrium quantum processes. In contrast to thermodynamic processes, quantum fluctuations are not suppressed in the…
For driven open systems in contact with multiple heat reservoirs, we find the marginal distributions of work or heat do not satisfy any fluctuation theorem, but only the joint distribution of work and heat satisfies a family of fluctuation…
In classical Markov jump processes, current fluctuations can only be reduced at the cost of increased dissipation. To explore how quantum effects influence this trade-off, we analyze the uncertainty of steady-state currents in Markovian…
Measurements of any property of a microscopic system are bound to show significant deviations from the average, due to thermal fluctuations. For time-integrated currents such as heat, work or entropy production in a steady state, it is in…
Small systems in contact with a heat bath evolve by stochastic dynamics. Here we show that, when one such small system is weakly coupled to another one, it is possible to infer the presence of such weak coupling by observing the violation…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
What is the major difference between large and small systems? At small length-scales the dynamics is dominated by fluctuations, whereas at large scales fluctuations are irrelevant. Therefore, any thermodynamically consistent description of…
We analyze thermodynamic bounds on equilibrium fluctuations of an order parameter, which are analogous to relations, which have been derived recently in the context of non-equilibrium fluctuations of currents. We discuss the case of {\it…
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…
We have performed an extensive analysis of a single particle stochastic heat engine constructed by manipulating a Brownian particle in a time dependent harmonic potential. The cycle consists of two isothermal steps at different temperatures…
We consider a particle dragged through a medium at constant temperature as described by a Langevin equation with a time-dependent potential. The time-dependence is specified by an external protocol. We give conditions on potential and…
We consider an isothermal machine composed of two Brownian particles (say particle A and B) connected by a harmonic spring. A constant load is attached to particle A, and the particle B is trapped in a harmonic confinement whose minimum is…
For a two-level quantum mechanical system, we derive microscopically the exact expression for the fluctuation of microscopic work in a multi-step non-equilibrium process, and we rigorously prove that in an isothermal process, the…
We illustrate recent results concerning the validity of the work fluctuation theorem in open quantum systems [M. Campisi, P. Talkner, and P. H\"{a}nggi, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 102}, 210401 (2009)], by applying them to a solvable model of an…
Passivity is a fundamental concept in thermodynamics that demands a quantum system's energy cannot be lowered by any reversible, unitary process acting on the system. In the limit of many such systems, passivity leads in turn to the concept…
It is common to study polymer physics through the use of idealized single-chain models, and the most popular of these is the freely jointed chain model. In certain thermodynamic ensembles, statistical mechanical treatment of this model is…
Understanding and manipulating work fluctuations in microscale and nanoscale systems are of both fundamental and practical interest. For example, aspects of work fluctuations will be an important factor in designing nanoscale heat engines.…
Starting at the mesoscopic level with a general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics in terms of Markov jump processes, we identify the scaling conditions that ensure the emergence of a (typically nonlinear) deterministic dynamics and…