Related papers: The most elementary heat to work conversion: work …
Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…
By computing the local energy expectation values with respect to some local measurement basis we show that for any quantum system there are two fundamentally different contributions: changes in energy that do not alter the local von Neumann…
We discuss work performed on a quantum two-level system coupled to multiple thermal baths. To evaluate the work, a measurement of photon exchange between the system and the baths is envisioned. In a realistic scenario, some photons remain…
Temperature is a deceptively simple concept that still raises deep questions at the forefront of quantum physics research. The observation of thermalisation in completely isolated quantum systems, such as cold-atom quantum simulators,…
We use a near quantum limited detector to experimentally track individual quantum state trajectories of a driven qubit formed by the hybridization of a waveguide cavity and a transmon circuit. For each measured quantum coherent trajectory,…
Hybrid quantum systems can often be described in terms of polaritons. These are quasiparticles formed of superpositions of their constituents, with relative weights depending on some control parameter in their interaction. In many cases,…
Heat engines, which cyclically transform heat into work, are ubiquitous in technology. Lasers and masers, which generate a coherent electromagnetic field, may be viewed as heat engines that rely on population inversion or coherence in the…
Close to equilibrium, the exchange of particles and heat between macroscopic systems at different temperatures and different chemical potentials is known to be governed by a matrix of transport coefficients which is positive and symmetric.…
By reformulating the first law of thermodynamics in the fashion of quantum-mechanical operators on the parameter manifold, we propose a universal class of quantum heat engines (QHE) using the multi-level quantum system as the working…
Motivated by the recent interest in thermodynamics of micro- and mesoscopic quantum systems we study the maximal amount of work that can be reversibly extracted from a quantum system used to store temporarily energy. Guided by the notion of…
Solar cells are engines converting energy supplied by the photon flux into work. All known types of macroscopic engines and turbines are also self-oscillating systems which yield a periodic motion at the expense of a usually non-periodic…
Recently, the concept of minimal dissipation has been brought forward as a means to define work performed on open quantum systems [Phys. Rev. A 105, 052216 (2022)]. We discuss this concept from the point of view of projection operator…
Assigning the variations of internal energy into heat or work contributions is a challenging task due to the fact that these properties are trajectory dependent. A number of proposals have been put forward for open quantum systems following…
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the…
Regarded as one of the most fundamental concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, work has received well-grounded definitions within the quantum framework since the 1970s, having being successfully applied to many contexts. Recent…
The interaction of a single-photon wave packet with an initially excited two-level atom in free space is studied in semiclassical and quantum approaches. It is shown that the final state of the field does not contain doubly occupied modes.…
We propose a novel approach to define and measure the statistics of work, internal energy and dissipated heat in a driven quantum system. In our framework the presence of a physical detector arises naturally and work and its statistics can…
We study the physics of quantum phase transitions from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. For first order quantum phase transitions, we find that the average work done per quench in crossing the critical point is…
The junction of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) operating in the tunneling regime was irradiated with femtosecond laser pulses. A photo-excited hot electron in the STM tip resonantly tunnels into an excited state of a single molecule…
We propose an embedding of standard active particle models in terms of two-temperature processes. One temperature refers to an ambient thermal bath, and the other temperature effectively describes ``hot spots,'' i.e., systems with few…