Related papers: An operational approach to quantum stochastic ther…
Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…
The first law of thermodynamics imposes not just a constraint on the energy-content of systems in extreme quantum regimes, but also symmetry-constraints related to the thermodynamic processing of quantum coherence. We show that this…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a single particle with two available energy levels, in contact with a classical (Maxwell-Boltzmann) or quantum (Bose-Einstein) heat bath. The particle can undergo transitions between the levels…
One of the principal objectives of quantum thermodynamics is to explore quantum effects and their potential beneficial role in thermodynamic tasks like work extraction or refrigeration. So far, even though several papers have already shown…
Information-theoretic approaches provide a promising avenue for extending the laws of thermodynamics to the nanoscale. Here, we provide a general fundamental lower limit, valid for systems with an arbitrary Hamiltonian and in contact with…
How should one define thermodynamic quantities (internal energy, work, heat, etc.) for quantum systems coupled to their environments strongly? We examine three (classically equivalent) definitions of a quantum system's internal energy under…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
Thermodynamics was developed in the XIXth century to provide a physical description to engines and other macroscopic thermal machines. Since then, progress in nanotechnologies urged to extend these formalism, initially designed for…
One of the most important goals in quantum thermodynamics is to demonstrate advantages of thermodynamic protocols over their classical counterparts. For that, it is necessary to (i) develop theoretical tools and experimental set-ups to deal…
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…
Thermodynamics relies on the possibility to describe systems composed of a large number of constituents in terms of few macroscopic variables. Its foundations are rooted into the paradigm of statistical mechanics, where thermal properties…
Stochastic thermodynamics provides the framework to analyze thermodynamic laws and quantities along individual trajectories of small but fully observable systems. If the observable level fails to capture all relevant degrees of freedom,…
The second law of classical thermodynamics, based on the positivity of the entropy production, only holds for deterministic processes. Therefore the Second Law in stochastic quantum thermodynamics may not hold. By making a fundamental…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
Local master equations are a widespread tool to model open quantum systems, especially in the context of many-body systems. These equations, however, are believed to lead to thermodynamic anomalies and violation of the laws of…
The entropy production rate is a key quantity in non-equilibrium thermodynamics of both classical and quantum processes. No universal theory of entropy production is available to date, which hinders progress towards its full grasping. By…
Building on parallels between geometric quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, we explore an alternative basis for quantum thermodynamics that exploits the differential geometry of the underlying state space. We develop both…
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…
At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…