Related papers: The most elementary heat to work conversion: work …
Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy…
Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
We present here a machine that is capable of extracting work from a single heat bath. Although no significant temperature gradient is involved in the operation of the machine, yet the Carnot efficiency as high as one is achievable. Working…
The work is a concept of fundamental importance in thermodynamics. An open question is how to describe the work fluctuation for quantum coherent processes in the presence of initial quantum coherence in the energy basis. With the aim of…
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…
A pair of systems at different temperatures is a classic environment for a heat engine, which produces work during the relaxation to a common equilibrium. It is generally believed that a direct interaction between the two systems will…
The status of the photon in the modern physics was analysed. Within the frames of the Standard Model of particle physics the photon is considered to be the genuine elementary particle, being to be the messenger of the electromagnetic…
We review theoretical approaches to analyzing efficiency of steady state heat to work conversion which is crucial in the timely problem of optimizing efficiency of small-scale heat engines and refrigerators. A rather abstract perspective of…
The radiation of photons by electrons is investigated in the framework of quantum electrodynamics up to the second order in the coupling constant $e$. The $N$-particle, coherent, and thermal initial states are considered and the forms of…
We study how Thomson's formulation of the second law: no work is extracted from an equilibrium ensemble by a cyclic process, emerges in the quantum situation through the averaging over fluctuations of work. The latter concept is carefully…
Frequency up-conversion of few low-energy photons into a single high-energy photon, greatly contributes to imaging, light sources, detection and other fields of research. However, it offers negligible efficiency when up-converting many…
We consider a simple model of a stochastic heat engine, which consists of a single Brownian particle moving in a one-dimensional periodically breathing harmonic potential. Overdamped limit is assumed. Expressions of second moments…
Many work extraction or information erasure processes in the literature involve the raising and lowering of energy levels via external fields. But even if the actual system is treated quantum mechanically, the field is assumed to be…
Traditional quantum thermodynamic frameworks associate work to energy exchanges induced by unitary transformations generated by external controls, and heat to energy exchanges induced by bath interaction. Recently, a framework was…
Some thermodynamical properties of solids, such as heat capacity and magnetic susceptibility, have recently been shown to be linked to the amount of entanglement in a solid. However this entanglement may appear a mere mathematical artifact…
We propose a quantum heat transformer (QHT), a quantum thermodynamic device that modulates temperature gradients between two thermal junctions in quantum systems. Functionally, the QHT is analogous to classical absorption heat transformers…
We analyse the process of conversion of near-field thermal radiation into usable work by considering the radiation emitted between two planar sources supporting surface phonon-polaritons. The maximum work flux that can be extracted from the…
The theory of the electron relaxation in metals excited by an ultrashort optical pump is developed on the basis of the solution of the linearized kinetic equation. The kinetic equation includes both the electron-electron and the…
Quantum oscillators prepared out of thermal equilibrium can be used to produce work and transmit information. By intensive cooling of a single oscillator, its thermal energy deterministically dissipates to a colder environment, and the…