Related papers: Zeroth Law in Quantum Thermodynamics at Strong Cou…
Temperature is usually defined for physical systems at thermal equilibrium. Nevertheless one may wonder if it would be possible to attribute a meaningful notion of temperature to an arbitrary quantum state, beyond simply the thermal (Gibbs)…
We use the quantum Brownian model to derive the uncertainty relation for a quantum open system in an arbitrarily-squeezed initial state interacting with an environment at finite temperature. We examine the relative importance of the quantum…
Quantum thermodynamics has emerged as a central field for understanding how energy conversion processes occur in microscopic systems. In these systems, effects such as coherence, entanglement, and non-Markovianity play key roles. In this…
The free energy of a quantum oscillator in an arbitrary heat bath at a temperature T is given by a "remarkable formula" which involves only a single integral. This leads to a corresponding simple result for the entropy. The low temperature…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
We generally study whether or not the information of an open quantum system could be totally erased by its surrounding environment in the long time. For a harmonic oscillator coupled to a bath of a spectral density with zero-value regions,…
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…
Equilibrium probes have been widely used in various noisy quantum metrology schemes. However, such an equilibrium-probe-based metrology scenario severely suffers from the low-temperature-error divergence problem in the weak-coupling regime.…
Noncommutativity of observables is a central feature of quantum physics. It plays a fundamental role in the formulation of the uncertainty principle for complementary variables and strongly affects the laws of thermodynamics for systems…
Thermodynamics is the phenomenological theory of heat and work. Here we analyze to what extent quantum thermodynamic relations are immune to the underlying mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. As a main result, we show that the…
The dimensionality of a thermometer is key in the design of quantum thermometry schemes. In general, the phenomenology that is typical of finite-dimensional quantum thermometry does not apply to infinite dimensional ones. We analyse the…
The problem of mutual equilibration between two finite, identical quantum systems, A and B, prepared initially at different temperatures is elucidated. We show that the process of energy exchange between the two systems leads to accurate…
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, cycles applied to thermodynamic equilibrium states cannot perform work (passivity property of thermodyamic equilibrium states). In the presence of matter this can hold only in the rest frame of…
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 extend on ideas from standard thermodynamics to show that temperature can be assigned to a general nonequilibrium quantum system. By choosing a physically motivated complete set of observables and expanding the system state thereupon,…
A quantum system and a thermal bath can reach thermal equilibrium through an interaction, whereupon the system acquires the same temperature as the bath. But how does a delocalised quantum system thermalise with a bath whose local…
We consider the notion of thermal equilibrium for an individual closed macroscopic quantum system in a pure state, i.e., described by a wave function. The macroscopic properties in thermal equilibrium of such a system, determined by its…
Do negative absolute temperatures matter physics and specifically Statistical Physics? We provide evidence that we can certainly answer positively to this vexata quaestio. The great majority of models investigated by statistical mechanics…
At low temperature a thermodynamic system undergoes a phase transition when a physical parameter passes through a singularity point of the free energy, corresponding to formation of a new order. At high temperature the thermal fluctuations…
We derive Fourier's law for a completely coherent quasi one--dimensional chaotic quantum system coupled locally to two heat baths at different temperatures. We solve the master equation to first order in the temperature difference. We show…