Related papers: Work as a Memory Record
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…
We investigate the connection between recent results in quantum thermodynamics and fluctuation relations by adopting a fully quantum mechanical description of thermodynamics. By including a work system whose energy is allowed to fluctuate,…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…
How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics states that a system in contact with a heat bath can undergo a transformation if and only if its free energy decreases. However, the "if" part of this statement is only true when the effective heat bath is…
We consider a system model of a general finite-state machine (ratchet) that simultaneously interacts with three kinds of reservoirs: a heat reservoir, a work reservoir, and an information reservoir, the latter being taken to be a running…
The minimal work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is studied…
The minimum work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for the adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is…
We study dynamic cooling, where an externally driven two-level system is cooled via reservoir, a quantum system with initial canonical equilibrium state. We obtain explicitly the minimal possible temperature $T_{\rm min}>0$ reachable for…
We discuss the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by a change in a control parameter and undergoing a unitary process. We compare the work actually done on the system with the one that would be performed…
Second law of thermodynamics is applied to a few electronic processes. It is seen that the second law of thermodynamics holds good for all except one mentioned here. The classical approach, based on exact equivalence of emission and…
Artificial molecular machines are often driven by the periodic variation of an external parameter. This external control exerts work on the system of which a part can be extracted as output if the system runs against an applied load.…
In this report I discuss fluctuation theorems and transient violations of the second law of thermodynamics in small systems. Special emphasis is placed on free-energy recovery methods in the framework of non-equilibrium single-molecule…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
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 consequence of the Second Law of thermodynamics is that no thermodynamic system with a single heat source at constant temperature can convert heat into mechanical work in a recurrent manner. First we note that this is equivalent to…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
The non-linearity of the theory of gravity induces a hysteresis effect in both the systems interacting with gravity and in the gravitational field. The effect is usually referred to as the memory effect. In this paper, we explore this…