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Heat and work in thermodynamics refer to the measurement of changes in energy content of external bodies (baths and agents). We discuss the implications of quantum mechanics on the possibility to measure work in a mesoscopic context. The…

We study a quantum theory based on two assumptions: In the intrinsic frame of reference of an isolated, macroscopic system, (i) the system has no global motion and is not entangled with any other system, (ii) time evolution of statevectors…

The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…

In this mainly pedagogical article, we discuss under what circumstances measurements play a special role in quantum processes. In particular we discuss the following facts which appear to be a common area of confusion: i) from a fundamental…

We propose a decoding-based approach to detect context effects on neural codes in longitudinal neural recording data. The approach is agnostic to how information is encoded in neural activity, and can control for a variety of possible…

We consider highly inaccurate measurements made on classical stochastic and quantum systems. In the quantum case such a \e{weak} measurement preserves coherence between the system's alternatives. We demonstrate that in both cases the…

Metacognition, understood as the monitoring and regulation of one's own cognitive processes, is inherently sequential: an agent evaluates an internal state, updates it, and may then re-evaluate under modified criteria. Order effects in…

Any repeated use of a fixed experimental instrument is subject to memory effects. We design an estimation method uncovering the details of the underlying interaction between the system and the internal memory without having any experimental…

Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…

The search for empirical schemes to evidence the nonclassicality of large masses is a central quest of current research. However, practical schemes to witness the irreducible quantumness of an arbitrarily large mass are still lacking. To…

We present a unifying framework to the understanding of when and how quantum mechanical systems become independent of their initial conditions and adapt macroscopic properties (like temperature) of the environment.By viewing this problem…

Quantum operations describe any state change allowed in quantum mechanics, including the evolution of an open system or the state change due to a measurement. In this letter we present a general method based on quantum tomography for…

Macroscopic observables of a system are of keen interest in real applications such as the design of novel materials. Current methods rely on microscopic trajectory simulations, where the forces on all microscopic coordinates need to be…

Testing quantum theory on macroscopic scales is a longstanding challenge that might help to revolutionise physics. For example, laboratory tests (such as those anticipated in nanomechanical or biological systems) may look to rule out…

A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's…

Quantum operations are the most widely used tool in the theory of quantum information processing, representing elementary transformations of quantum states that are composed to form complex quantum circuits. The class of quantum…

The prevailing assumption in agent orchestration is that more context is better. We test this on multi-agent software design across 10 tasks, 7 context-injection conditions, and over 2,700 runs, and find a crossover effect: the same…

The principle of microscopic reversibility is a fundamental element in the formulation of fluctuation relations and the Onsager reciprocal relations. As such, a clear description of whether and how this principle is adapted to the quantum…

In the context of constrained quantum mechanics, reference systems are used to construct relational observables that are invariant under the action of the symmetry group. Upon measurement of a relational observable, the reference system…

The quantum first-detection problem concerns the statistics of the time at which a system, subject to repeated measurements, is observed in a prescribed target state for the first time. Unlike its classical counterpart, the measurement back…