Related papers: Second law of thermodynamics with quantum memory
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…
Modern technologies could soon make it possible to investigate the operation cycles of quantum heat engines by counting the photons that are emitted and absorbed by their working systems. Using the quantum jump approach to open-system…
The second law of thermodynamics constrains that the efficiency of heat engines, classical or quantum, cannot be greater than the universal Carnot efficiency. We discover another bound for the efficiency of a quantum Otto heat engine…
We examine the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the energy eigenstates of quantum many-body systems that undergo cyclic unitary evolution. Using a numerically optimized control protocol, we analyze how the work…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
We present a critical examination of the difficulties with the quantum versions of a lifted weight that are widely used as work storage systems in quantum thermodynamics. To overcome those difficulties, we turn to the strong connections…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system is non-decreasing. Discussing the Second Law in the quantum world poses new challenges and provides new opportunities, involving fundamental…
Extending the quantum formulation of [Phys. Rev. X 3, 041003 (2013)] to a more general setting for studying the thermodynamics of information processing including initial correlations, we generalize the second law of thermodynamics to…
The information-carrying capacity of a memory is known to be a thermodynamic resource facilitating the conversion of heat to work. Szilard's engine explicates this connection through a toy example involving an energy-degenerate two-state…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
Advantages of quantum effects in several technologies, such as computation and communication, have already been well appreciated, and some devices, such as quantum computers and communication links, exhibiting superiority to their classical…
The Kullback-Leibler inequality is a way of comparing any two density matrices. A technique to set up the density matrix for a physical system is to use the maximum entropy principle, given the entropy as a functional of the density matrix,…
Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…
Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
We report two results complementing the second law of thermodynamics for Markovian open quantum systems coupled to multiple reservoirs with different temperatures and chemical potentials. First, we derive a nonequilibrium free energy…
The first law of thermodynamics restates the law of conservation of energy. It partitions the change in energy of a system into two pieces, heat and work. While there is no ambiguity to define heat and work in classical thermodynamics,…
We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…
According to Thermodynamics, the efficiency of a heat engine is upper bounded by Carnot efficiency. For macroscopic systems, the Carnot efficiency is, however, achieved only for quasi static processes. And, considerable attention has been…