Related papers: Energetic instability of passive states in thermod…
Passive states are defined as those states that do not allow for work extraction in a cyclic (unitary) process. Within the set of passive states, thermal states are the most stable ones: they maximize the entropy for a given energy, and…
Passive states, i.e., those states from which no work can be extracted via unitary operations, play an important role in the foundations and applications of quantum thermodynamics. They generalize the familiar Gibbs thermal states, which…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
Passivity is a fundamental concept that constitutes a necessary condition for any quantum system to attain thermodynamic equilibrium, and for a notion of temperature to emerge. While extensive work has been done that exploits this, the…
We give a simple and intuitive proof that the only states which are completely passive, i.e. those states from which work cannot be extracted even with infinitely many copies, are Gibbs states at positive temperatures. The proof makes use…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
Quantum states that can yield work in a cyclical Hamiltonian process form one of the primary resources in the context of quantum thermodynamics. Conversely, states whose average energy cannot be lowered by unitary transformations are called…
We argue that thermal machines can be understood from the perspective of `virtual qubits' at `virtual temperatures': The relevant way to view the two heat baths which drive a thermal machine is as a composite system. Virtual qubits are…
The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources…
We examine when it is possible to locally extract energy from a bipartite quantum system in the presence of strong coupling and entanglement, a task which is expected to be restricted by entanglement in the low-energy eigenstates. We fully…
Thermodynamics imposes restrictions on what state transformations are possible. In the macroscopic limit of asymptotically many independent copies of a state---as for instance in the case of an ideal gas---the possible transformations…
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…
The proper definition of entropy is fundamental to the relationship between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. It also plays a major role in the recent debate about the validity of the concept of negative temperature. In this paper,…
The interplay between quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence, and classical notions, such as energy, is a subtle topic at the forefront of quantum thermodynamics. The traditional Carnot argument limits the conversion of heat to…
Active states, from which work can be extracted by time-dependent perturbations, are an important resource for quantum thermodynamics in the absence of heat baths. Here we characterize this resource, establishing a resource theory that…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…
The second law of thermodynamics states that work cannot be extracted from thermal equilibrium, whose quantum formulation is known as complete passivity; A state is called completely passive if work cannot be extracted from any number of…
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…
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…