Related papers: Quantum Jarzynski equality of measurement-based wo…
A main goal of single-molecule experiments is to evaluate equilibrium free energy differences by applying fluctuation relations to repeated work measurements along irreversible processes. We quantify the error that is made in a free energy…
Developments in the thermodynamics of small quantum systems envisage non-classical thermal machines. In this scenario, energy fluctuations play a relevant role in the description of irreversibility. We experimentally implement a quantum…
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…
We consider a class of quantum heat engines consisting of two subsystems interacting via a unitary transformation and coupled to two separate baths at different temperatures $T_h > T_c$. The purpose of the engine is to extract work due to…
The Jarzynski equality allows the calculation of free-energy differences using values of work measured from nonequilibrium trajectories. The number of trajectories required to accurately estimate free-energy differences in this way grows…
Jarzynski equality and related fluctuation theorems can be formulated for various setups. Such an equality was recently derived for nonunitary quantum evolutions described by unital quantum operations, i.e., for completely positive,…
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…
The Jarzynski equality relates the free energy difference between two equilibrium states to the fluctuating irreversible work afforded to switch between them. The prescribed fixed temperature for the equilibrium states implicitly constrains…
Thermodynamics is the phenomenological theory of heat and work. Here we analyze to what extent quantum thermodynamic relations are immune to the underlying mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. As a main result, we show that the…
From the perspective of quantum thermodynamics, realisable measurements cost work and result in measurement devices that are not perfectly correlated with the measured systems. We investigate the consequences for the estimation of work in…
The characteristic function of the work performed by an external time-dependent force on a Hamiltonian quantum system is identified with the time-ordered correlation function of the exponentiated system's Hamiltonian. A similar expression…
We extend the quantum jump method to nearly adiabatically driven open quantum systems in a way that allows for an accurate account of the external driving in the system-environment interaction. Using this framework, we construct the…
A system--bath (SB) model is considered to examine the Jarzynski equality in the fully quantum regime. In our previous paper [J. Chem. Phys. 153 (2020) 234107], we carried out "exact" numerical experiments using hierarchical equations of…
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…
In this paper we give a pedagogical introduction to the ideas of quantum thermodynamics and work fluctuations, using only basic concepts from quantum and statistical mechanics. After reviewing the concept of work, as usually taught in…
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…
We propose and analyze the theoretical model for a two-stroke quantum heat engine with one of the heat baths replaced by a non-selective quantum measurement. We show that the engine's invariant reference state depends on whether the cycle…
The transition between a regime in which thermodynamic relations apply only to ensembles of small systems coupled to a large environment and a regime in which they can be used to characterize individual macroscopic systems is analyzed in…
To define the work performed on a driven quantum system in a physically sound way has turned out to be a truly non-trivial task, except in some special cases of limited applicability. This topic has been in a focus of intense research…
We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…