Related papers: The most elementary heat to work conversion: work …
Quantum thermodynamics allows for the interconversion of quantum coherence and mechanical work. Quantum coherence is thus a potential physical resource for quantum machines. However, formulating a general nonequilibrium thermodynamics of…
In this Letter, we study the optical heating of spatially dispersive solids due to electronic light scattering (ELS), a phenomenon driven by indirect optical transitions. In this process, a spatial heterogeneity generates an optical…
Heat transfer and dissipation exists in almost any physical, chemical or biological systems. Cells, as the basic unit of life, undergo continuous heat transfer and dissipation during their metabolism. The heat transfer and dissipation…
We define thermodynamic configurations and identify two primitives of discrete quantum processes between configurations for which heat and work can be defined in a natural way. This allows us to uncover a general second law for any discrete…
Thermal emission is the process by which all objects at non-zero temperatures emit light, and is well-described by the classic Planck, Kirchhoff, and Stefan-Boltzmann laws. For most solids, the thermally emitted power increases…
Toward the formulation of the operational approach to quantum thermodynamics, the heat-up operator is explicitly constructed. This quantum operation generates for a generic system an irreversible transformation from a pure ground state at…
Work extractable from quantum system can be viewed as a resource to perform some tasks. Here, we try to related the work extractable to some resource theory. To do this, we consider completely passive states and passive states as free…
We investigate work extraction protocols designed to transfer the maximum possible energy to a battery using sequential access to $N$ copies of an unknown pure qubit state. The core challenge is designing interactions to optimally balance…
Electric power may, in principle, be generated in a highly efficient manner from heat created by focused solar irradiation, chemical combustion, or nuclear decay by means of thermionic energy conversion. As the conversion efficiency of the…
One of the fundamental questions in the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics is the role played by coherence in energetic processes that occur at the quantum level. Here, we address this issue by investigating two different quantum…
We analyze work extraction from an autonomous (self-contained) heat-powered optomechanical setup. The initial state of the quantized mechanical oscillator plays a key role. As the initial mean amplitude of the oscillator decreases, the…
In this work, we investigate the amount of energy that can be extracted or charged through unitary operations when only minimal information about the state is known. Assuming knowledge of only the mean energy of the state, we start by…
We propose a quantum heat engine composed of two superconducting transmission line resonators interacting with each other via an optomechanical-like coupling. One resonator is periodically excited by a thermal pump. The incoherently driven…
Quantum teleportation -- the transmission and reconstruction over arbitrary distances of the state of a quantum system -- is demonstrated experimentally. During teleportation, an initial photon which carries the polarization that is to be…
Understanding how to assign internal energy, heat, and work in quantum systems beyond weak coupling remains a central problem in quantum thermodynamics, particularly as the difference between competing definitions becomes increasingly…
Conservation of energy under thermal operations, \textbf{TO}, is ensured by commutation of the unitary generating such operations with the total Hamiltonian. However in realistic scenarios, perturbations or disturbances in the system are…
Quantum optomechanics opens a possibility to mediate a physical connection of quantum optics and classical thermodynamics. We propose and theoretically analyze a one-way chain starting from various quantum states of radiation. In the chain,…
A consequence of the Second Law of thermodynamics is that no thermodynamic system with a single heat source at constant temperature can convert heat into mechanical work in a recurrent manner. First we note that this is equivalent to…
Single photon detection generally consists of several stages: the photon has to interact with one or more charged particles, its excitation energy will be converted into other forms of energy, and amplification to a macroscopic signal must…
Understanding the thermodynamics of radiation and the quantum-mechanical interactions between light and matter is important both for theoretical purposes and for technological advances, such as determining the limits of key processes like…