Related papers: The second law and beyond in microscopic quantum s…
We propose a new form of the Second Law inequality that defines a tight bound for extractable work from the non-equilibrium quantum state. In classical thermodynamics, the optimal work is given by the difference of free energy, what…
We present an analysis of the foundations of the well known Clausius inequality. It is shown that, in general, the inequality is not a logical consequence of the Kelvin-Planck formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Some thought…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
Underlying the classical thermodynamic principles are analogous microscopic laws, arising from the fundamental axioms of quantum mechanics. These define quantum thermodynamic variables such as quantum work and heat and characterize the…
We consider the Non-Equilibrium Steady State induced by two infinite quantum thermal reservoirs at different temperatures and derive an inequality giving the upper bound of the work extracted by cyclic operations. This upper bound tends to…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
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,…
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like…
Several models of quantum open systems are known at present to violate, according to principles of the standard quantum theory of open systems, the second law of thermodynamics. Here, a new and rather trivial model of another type is…
Traditional discussions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics studied the limits of very specific types of devices, such as heat engines, chemical reactions, and molecules channeled by valves. Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0110422)…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
Equilibrium statistics of Hamiltonian systems is correctly described by the microcanonical ensemble, whereas canonical ones fail in the most interesting, mostly inhomogeneous, situations like phase separations or away from the thermodynamic…
Recently implemented quantum devices such as quantum processors and quantum simulators combine highly complicated quantum dynamics with high-resolution measurements. We present a passivity deformation methodology that sets thermodynamic…
Clausius' statement of the second law of thermodynamics reads: Heat will flow spontaneously from a hot to cold reservoir. This statement should hold for transport of energy through a quantum network composed of small subsystems each coupled…
Two testable schemes for quantum heat engines are investigated under the quantization framework of noncommutative (NC) quantum mechanics (QM). By identifying the phenomenological connection between the phase-space NC driving parameters and…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
In quantum statistical mechanics, equilibrium states have been shown to be the typical states for a system that is entangled with its environment, suggesting a possible identification between thermodynamic and von Neumann entropies. In this…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
The second law of thermodynamics for adiabatic operations -- constraints on state transitions in closed systems under external control -- is one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics. On the other hand, it is recently established…
Bell's inequalities, in the form given by Cerf and Adami, are derived from the combination of the second law of thermodynamics and the Markov postulate. Violations of these inequalities are discussed in terms of the mixing characteristics…