Related papers: Thermodynamics of weakly coherent collisional mode…

Simulations are performed of a small quantum system interacting with a quantum environment. The system consists of various initial states of two harmonic oscillators coupled to give normal modes. The environment is "designed" by its level…

The statistical mechanical description of small systems staying in thermal equilibrium with an environment can be achieved by means of the Hamiltonian of mean force. In contrast to the reduced density matrix of an open quantum system, or…

Understanding how coherence of quantum systems affects thermodynamic quantities, such as work and heat, is essential for harnessing quantumness effectively in thermal quantum technologies. Here, we study the unique contributions of quantum…

One of the fundamental questions in the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics is the role played by coherence in energetic processes that occur at the quantum level. Here, we address this issue by investigating two different quantum…

The impact of quantum mechanics on thermodynamics, particularly on the principles and designs of heat machines (HM), has been limited by the incompatibility of quantum coherent evolution with the dissipative, open-system nature of all…

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat flows spontaneously from a high-temperature entity to a lower-temperature one. Yet, recent advances have demonstrated that quantum correlations between a system and its thermal environment…

Collective effects have attracted remarkable recent interest, not only for their presence in several systems in nature but also for the possibility of being used for the construction of efficient engine setups. Notwithstanding, little is…

Entanglement within a given device provides a potential resource for quantum information processing. Entanglement between system and environment leads to decoherence (thus suppressing non-classical features within the system) but also opens…

This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…

We study the modification of the second law of thermodynamics for a quantum system interacting with a reservoir regarding quantum coherence. The whole system is isolated so that neither energy nor information is lost. It is discovered that…

Thermodynamic principles are often deceptively simple and yet surprisingly powerful. We show how a simple rule, such as the net flow of energy in and out of a moving atom under nonequilibrium steady state condition, can expose the…

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…

The thermodynamics of quantum systems coupled to periodically modulated heat baths and work reservoirs is developed. By identifying affinities and fluxes, the first and second law are formulated consistently. In the linear response regime,…

We present a consistent thermodynamic theory for the resonant level model in the wide band limit, whose level energy is driven slowly by an external force. The problem of defining 'system' and 'bath' in the strong coupling regime is…

How quantum coherence influences thermodynamic behavior remains an open question in quantum thermodynamics. Here we investigate this relation within the pure dephasing framework, where a central qubit interacts with a finite Ising-like spin…

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…

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…

We consider viscous, heat conducting mixtures of molecularly miscible chemical species forming a fluid in which the constituents can undergo chemical reactions. Assuming a common temperature for all components, we derive a closed system of…

The interplay between quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence, and classical notions, such as energy, is a subtle topic at the forefront of quantum thermodynamics. The traditional Carnot argument limits the conversion of heat to…

All existing heat machines are dissipative open systems. Hence, they cannot operate fully coherently. We propose to replace this conventional thermodynamic paradigm by a completely different one, whereby heat machines are nonlinear coherent…