Related papers: Reversing the direction of heat flow using quantum…

We analyze the power output of a quantum dot machine coupled to two electronic reservoirs via thermoelectric contacts, and to two thermal reservoirs - one hot and one cold. This machine is a nanoscale analogue of a conventional thermocouple…

The dynamics when a hot many-body quantum system is brought into instantaneous contact with a cold many-body quantum system can be understood as a combination of early time quantum correlation (von Neumann entropy) gain and late time energy…

We consider a thermodynamic machine in which the working fluid is a quantized harmonic oscillator that is controlled on timescales that are much faster than the oscillator period. We find that operation in this `fast' regime allows access…

We introduce a natural way of visualizing the entropy production in heat transfer processes between a system and a thermal reservoir. This representation is particularly useful to highlight the asymmetric character of the heating and…

Landauer's principle sets fundamental thermodynamical constraints for classical and quantum information processing, thus affecting not only various branches of physics, but also of computer science and engineering. Despite its importance,…

There has been significant interest recently in using complex quantum systems to create effective nonreciprocal dynamics. Proposals have been put forward for the realization of artificial magnetic fields for photons and phonons;…

It has long been known that, fundamentally different from a large body of rarefied gas, when a Knudsen gas is immersed in a thermal bath, it may never reach thermal equilibrium. The root cause is nonchaoticity: as the particle-particle…

Fluctuation theorems are fundamental extensions of the second law of thermodynamics for small systems. Their general validity arbitrarily far from equilibrium makes them invaluable in nonequilibrium physics. So far, experimental studies of…

We study a chain of interacting individual quantum systems connected to heat baths at different temperatures on both ends. Starting with the two-system case, we thoroughly investigate the conditions for heat rectification (asymmetric heat…

While thermodynamics is a useful tool to describe the driving of large systems close to equilibrium, fluctuations dominate the distribution of heat and work in small systems and far from equilibrium. We study the heat generated by driving a…

Collisional reservoirs are becoming a major tool for modelling open quantum systems. In their simplest implementation, an external agent switches on, for a given time, the interaction between the system and a specimen from the reservoir.…

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…

A unified view on macroscopic thermodynamics and quantum transport is presented. Thermodynamic processes with an exchange of energy between two systems necessarily involve the flow of other balanceable quantities. These flows are first…

We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…

Quantum thermodynamics has emerged as a central field for understanding how energy conversion processes occur in microscopic systems. In these systems, effects such as coherence, entanglement, and non-Markovianity play key roles. In this…

We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in…

This thesis uses a quantity that is defined and justified by information theory -- mutual information -- to examine models of condensed matter systems. More precisely, it studies models which are made up out of ferromagnetically interacting…

Heat shuttling phenomenon is characterized by the presence of a non-zero heat flow between two bodies without net thermal bias on average. It was initially predicted in the context of nonlinear heat conduction within atomic lattices coupled…

We discuss a quantum typicality approach to examine systems composed of two subsystems at different temperatures. While dynamical quantum typicality is usually used to simulate high-temperature dynamics, we also investigate low-temperature…

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,…