Related papers: Some no-go results in Quantum Thermodynamics
Interactions between a quantum system and its environment at low temperatures can lead to violations of thermal laws for the system. The source of these violations is the entanglement between system and environment, which prevents the…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
There are both practical and foundational motivations to consider the thermodynamics of quantum systems at small scales. Here we address the issue of autonomous quantum thermal machines that are tailored to achieve some specific…
It is a common view in philosophy of physics that thermodynamics is a non-fundamental theory. This is motivated in particular by the fact that thermodynamics is considered to be a paradigmatic example for a theory that can be reduced to…
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…
Entropy is the distinguishing and most important concept of our efforts to understand and regularize our observations of a very large class of natural phenomena, and yet, it is one of the most contentious concepts of physics. In this…
Besides the growing interest in old concepts like temperature and entropy at the nanoscale, theories of relaxation and transport have recently regained a lot of attention. With the electronic circuits and computer chips getting smaller and…
We discuss the usefulness of quantum cloning and present examples of quantum computation tasks for which cloning offers an advantage which cannot be matched by any approach that does not resort to it. In these quantum computations, we need…
Much of the twentieth century physics has considered rigid laws-- even Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics were based on such laws. These laws operated in a smooth spacetime manifold. However more recent approaches as in Quantum…
Cooling atoms to ultralow temperatures has produced a wealth of opportunities in fundamental physics, precision metrology, and quantum science. The more recent application of sophisticated cooling techniques to molecules, which has been…
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…
The stationary state of a quantum particle strongly coupled to a quantum thermal bath is known to be non-gibbsian, due to entanglement with the bath. For harmonic potentials, where the system can be described by effective temperatures,…
We discuss the role of the notion of information in the description of physical reality. We consider theories for which dynamics is linear with respect to stochastic mixing. We point out that the no-cloning and no-deleting principles emerge…
Modern thermodynamic theories can be used to study highly complex quantum dynamics. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that the violation of thermodynamic constraints allows to detect the coupling of a quantum system to a hidden…
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…
What does it mean for one quantum process to be more disordered than another? Here we provide a precise answer to this question in terms of a quantum-mechanical generalization of majorization. The framework admits a complete description in…
We discuss the problem of consistency of quantum mechanics as applied to low energy nucleon dynamics with the symmetries of QCD. It is shown that the dynamics consistent with these symmetries is not governed by the Schrodinger equation. We…
The emergence of irreversibility in physical processes, despite the fundamentally reversible nature of quantum mechanics, remains an open question in physics. This thesis explores the intricate relationship between quantum mechanics and…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…