Related papers: Almost thermal operations: inhomogeneous reservoir…
Passive states, i.e., those states from which no work can be extracted via unitary operations, play an important role in the foundations and applications of quantum thermodynamics. They generalize the familiar Gibbs thermal states, which…
Using the quasi-equilibrium Helmholtz energy (qHE), defined as the thermodynamic work in a quasi-static process, we investigate the thermal properties of both an isothermal process and a transition process between the adiabatic and…
Traditional quantum thermodynamic frameworks associate work to energy exchanges induced by unitary transformations generated by external controls, and heat to energy exchanges induced by bath interaction. Recently, a framework was…
Eigenstate thermalization refers to the property that an energy eigenstate of a many-body system is indistinguishable from a thermal equilibrium ensemble at the same energy as far as expectation values of local observables are concerned. In…
We consider open quantum systems consisting of a finite system of independent fermions with arbitrary Hamiltonian coupled to one or more equilibrium fermion reservoirs (which need not be in equilibrium with each other). A strong form of the…
We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open…
In bipartite quantum systems commutation relations between the Hamiltonian of each subsystem and the interaction impose fundamental constraints on the dynamics of each partition. Here we investigate work, heat and entropy production in…
We study the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of pure decoherence processes in open quantum systems coupled to a thermal reservoir. We review various definitions of central quantities, such as internal energy, work, heat and entropy…
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…
Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…
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…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
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…
Accurately describing work extraction from a quantum system is a central objective for the extension of thermodynamics to individual quantum systems. The concepts of work and heat are surprisingly subtle when generalizations are made to…
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…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…
The presence of correlations in physical systems can be a valuable resource for many quantum information tasks. They are also relevant in thermodynamic transformations, and their creation is usually associated to some energetic cost. In…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
We investigate the thermodynamic behavior of open quantum systems through the Hamiltonian of Mean Force, focusing on two models: a two-qubit system interacting with a thermal bath and a Jaynes-Cummings Model without the rotating wave…
A Hamiltonian-based model of many harmonically interacting massive particles that are subject to linear friction and coupled to heat baths at different temperatures is used to study the dynamic approach to equilibrium and non-equilibrium…