Related papers: Surpassing the Carnot Efficiency by extracting imp…
The resource-theoretic approach to quantum thermodynamics assumes complete knowledge of the thermal equilibrium against which thermodynamic resources are defined. In practice, however, this state is determined by the system Hamiltonian and…
We study the modification of the second law of thermodynamics for a quantum system interacting with a reservoir regarding quantum coherence. The whole system is isolated so that neither energy nor information is lost. It is discovered that…
We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive…
In an article by Garc\'ia-Pintos et al. [Rev. Lett. 125, 040601 (2020)] the connection between the charging power of a quantum battery and the fluctuations of a "free energy operator" whose expectation value characterizes the maximum…
We show that work can be extracted from a two-level system (spin) coupled to a bosonic thermal bath. This is possible due to different initial temperatures of the spin and the bath, both positive (no spin population inversion) and is…
Quantization of energy is a quintessential characteristic of quantum systems. Here we analyze its effects on the operation of Otto cycle heat machines and show that energy quantization alone may alter and increase machine performance in…
The quantum analog of Carnot cycles in few-particle systems consists of two quantum adiabatic steps and two isothermal steps. This construction is formally justified by use of a minimum work principle. It is then shown, without relying on…
The Carnot cycle imposes a fundamental upper limit to the efficiency of a macroscopic motor operating between two thermal baths. However, this bound needs to be reinterpreted at microscopic scales, where molecular bio-motors and some…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
A long standing open problem whether a heat engine with finite power achieves the Carnot efficiency is investigated. We rigorously prove a general trade-off inequality on thermodynamic efficiency and time interval of a cyclic process with…
The possibility of extracting more work from a physical system thanks to the information obtained from measurements has been a topic of fundamental interest in the context of thermodynamics since the formulation of the Maxwell's demon…
Given a system with a finite heat capacity and a heat reservoir, and two values of initial temperatures, $T_+$ and $T_- (< T_+)$, we enquire, in which case the optimal work extraction is larger: when the reservoir is an infinite source at…
The work content of non-equilibrium systems in relation to a heat bath is often analyzed in terms of expectation values of an underlying random work variable. However, we show that when optimizing the expectation value of the extracted…
In this work, we study the efficiency of charging a quantum battery through optical pumping. The battery consists of a qutrit and it is connected to a natural thermal reservoir and an external coherent drive in the limit where its upper…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
This paper considers work extraction from a quantum system to a work storage system (or weight) following reference [1]. An alternative approach is here developed that relies on the comparison of subspace dimensions without a need to…
Extracting work from a physical system is one of the cornerstones of quantum thermodynamics. The extractable work, as quantified by ergotropy, necessitates a complete description of the quantum system. This is significantly more challenging…
Since its inception about two centuries ago thermodynamics has sparkled continuous interest and fundamental questions. According to the second law no heat engine can have an efficiency larger than Carnot's efficiency. The latter can be…
In systems described by the scattering theory, there is an upper bound, lower than Carnot, on the efficiency of steady-state heat to work conversion at a given output power. We show that interacting systems can overcome such bound and…
We study the connection between the charging power of quantum batteries and the fluctuations of the extractable work. We prove that in order to have a non-zero rate of change of the extractable work, the state $\rho_\mathcal{W}$ of the…