Related papers: Work as a Memory Record
Recently, our efforts to clarify the old question, if a memristor is a passive or active device [1], triggered debates between engineers, who have had advanced definitions of passivity/activity of devices, and physicists with significantly…
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…
Quantum measurement of a system can change its mean energy, as well as entropy. A selective measurement (classical or quantum) can be used as a "Maxwell's demon" to power a single-temperature heat engine, by decreasing the entropy. Quantum…
We solve a set of selected exercises on rotational motion requiring a mechanical and thermodynamical analysis. When non-conservative forces or thermal effects are present, a complete study must use the first law of thermodynamics together…
In the current research, we investigate the concept of spontaneously nonequilibrium dimension (SND), and show that a SND-based system can break the second law of thermodynamics. The main characteristic of the SND is the inherent…
Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
The information-carrying capacity of a memory is known to be a thermodynamic resource facilitating the conversion of heat to work. Szilard's engine explicates this connection through a toy example involving an energy-degenerate two-state…
Connections between information theory and thermodynamics have proven to be very useful to establish bounding limits for physical processes. Ideas such as Landauer's erasure principle and information assisted work extraction have greatly…
We study how Thomson's formulation of the second law: no work is extracted from an equilibrium ensemble by a cyclic process, emerges in the quantum situation through the averaging over fluctuations of work. The latter concept is carefully…
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…
Quantum thermodynamics supplies a consistent description of quantum heat engines and refrigerators up to the level of a single few level system coupled to the environment. Once the environment is split into three;a hot, cold and work…
Information processing at the molecular scale is limited by thermal fluctuations. This can cause undesired consequences in copying information since thermal noise can lead to errors that can compromise the functionality of the copy. For…
We address a new setting where the second law is under question: thermalizations in a quantum superposition of causal orders, enacted by the so-called quantum switch. This superposition has been shown to be associated with an increase in…
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…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…
Measurements --- interactions which establish correlations between a system and a recording device --- can be made thermodynamically reversible. One might be concerned that such reversibility will make the second law of thermodynamics…
The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources…
Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) harnesses driven quantum dynamics for time-series processing, yet the mechanisms behind the differing performance levels across its many implementations remain unclear. We show that apparently unrelated…
We consider open quantum systems weakly coupled to thermal reservoirs and subjected to quantum feedback operations triggered with or without delay by monitored quantum jumps. We establish a thermodynamic description of such system and…