Related papers: Heat capacity for systems with excited-state quant…

Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…

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 stochastic energetic exchanges in quantum heat engines. Due to microreversibility, these obey a fluctuation relation, called the heat engine fluctuation relation, which implies the Carnot bound: no machine can have an…

Solving finite-temperature properties of quantum many-body systems is generally challenging to classical computers due to their high computational complexities. In this article, we present experiments to demonstrate a hybrid…

The concept of thermal machines has evolved from the canonical steam engine to the recently proposed nanoscopic quantum systems as working fluids. The latter obey quantum open system dynamics and frequently operate in non-equilibrium…

A hallmark of a thermodynamic phase transition is the qualitative change of system thermodynamic properties such as energy and heat capacity. On the other hand, no phase transition is thought to operate in the supercritical state of matter…

The efficiency of macroscopic heat engines is restricted by the second law of thermodynamics. They can reach at most the efficiency of a Carnot engine. In contrast, heat currents in mesoscopic heat engines show fluctuations. Thus, there is…

A class of autonomous quantum heat baths satisfying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) criteria is proposed. We show that such systems are expected to cause thermal relaxation of much smaller quantum systems coupled to one of…

Classical phase transitions, like solid-liquid-gas or order-disorder spin magnetic phases, are all driven by thermal energy fluctuations by varying the temperature. On the other hand, quantum phase transitions happen at absolute zero…

Electronic heat capacity was calculated for a mesoscopically disordered s-wave superconductor treated as a spatial ensemble of domains with a continuously varying superconducting properties. The domains are assumed to have sizes larger than…

An important yet perplexing result from work in the 90s and 00s is the near-unity value of the ratio of fluctuations in the vacuum energy density of quantum fields to the mean in a collection of generic spacetimes. This was done by way of…

The consistent definition of the thermodynamic functions of small open quantum systems in contact with an environment in equilibrium with a heat bath has been the subject of many debates in the quantum community. In the present work we…

We investigate signatures of the excited-state quantum phase transition in the periodic dynamics of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and the Tavis-Cummings model. In the thermodynamic limit, expectation values of observables in eigenstates of…

Conventional thermo-statistics address infinite homogeneous systems within the canonical ensemble. However, some 170 years ago the original motivation of thermodynamics was the description of steam engines, i.e. boiling water. Its essential…

In this article it will be introduced a new theorem, can be considered a generalization of Hellmann-Feynman theorem[1]. The latter used in conjunction with the quantization of the free energy[2] of a quantum system allows to derive…

In a quantum Stirling heat engine, the heat exchanged with two thermal baths is partly utilized for performing work by redistributing the energy levels of the working substance. We analyze the thermodynamics of a quantum Stirling engine…

We present a theoretical and numerical analysis of a quantum system that is capable of functioning as a heat engine. This system could be realized experimentally using cold bosonic atoms confined to a double well potential that is created…

We exploit a prescription to observe directly the physical properties of the thermodynamic limit under continuously applied field in one-dimensional quantum finite lattice systems. By systematically scaling down the energy of the…

Under the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), quantum-quenched systems equilibrate towards canonical, thermal ensembles. While at first glance the ETH might seem a very strong hypothesis, we show that it is indeed not only…

For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…