Related papers: Quasistatic work processes: When slowness implies …
The minimum work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for the adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is…
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…
For a two-level quantum mechanical system, we derive microscopically the exact expression for the fluctuation of microscopic work in a multi-step non-equilibrium process, and we rigorously prove that in an isothermal process, the…
Quantum work fluctuation theorems are known to hold when the work is defined as the difference between the outcomes of projective measurements carried out on the Hamiltonian of the system at the initial and the final time instants of the…
It is a fundamental problem to characterize the nonequilibrium processes. For a slowly moving one-dimensional potential, we explore the quasi adiabatic dynamics of the initial energy eigenstates for a confined quantum system interacting…
Stochastic thermodynamics is a framework for describing non-equilibrium processes at the level of fluctuating trajectories, where the state of a system evolves as a stochastic time series, allowing thermodynamic quantities such as work,…
Work is one of the most basic notion in statistical mechanics, with work fluctuation theorems being one central topic in nanoscale thermodynamics. With Hamiltonian chaos commonly thought to provide a foundation for classical statistical…
One of the most important goals in quantum thermodynamics is to demonstrate advantages of thermodynamic protocols over their classical counterparts. For that, it is necessary to (i) develop theoretical tools and experimental set-ups to deal…
The minimal work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is studied…
The time-dependent variational principle using generalized Gaussian trial functions yields a finite dimensional approximation to the full quantum dynamics and is used in many disciplines. It is shown how these 'semi-quantum' dynamics may be…
We consider a quantum system with $N$ degrees of freedom which is classically chaotic. When $N$ is large, and both $\hbar$ and the quantum energy uncertainty $\Delta E$ are small, quantum chaos theory can be used to demonstrate the…
In Newtonian mechanics, any closed-system dynamics of a composite system in a microstate will leave all its individual subsystems in distinct microstates, however this fails dramatically in quantum mechanics due to the existence of quantum…
In this paper, decoherence is studied for quantum systems undergoing adiabatic processes, which are coupled to huge quantum environments. It is shown that decoherence can happen with respect to a preferred basis given by transient…
We characterize the conditions under which a multi-time quantum process with a finite temporal resolution can be approximately described by an equilibrium one. By providing a generalization of the notion of equilibration on average, where a…
Information spreads in time. For example, correlations dissipate when the correlated system locally couples to a third party, such as the environment. This simple but important fact forms the known quantum data-processing inequality. Here…
How to give a statistical description of thermodynamics in quantum systems is an open fundamental question. Concerning the work, the presence of initial quantum coherence in the energy basis can give rise to a quasiprobability of work,…
We derive the fluctuation theorem for quantum-state statistics that can be obtained when we initially measure the total energy of a quantum system at thermal equilibrium, let the system evolve unitarily, and record the quantum-state data…
For two canonical examples of driven mesoscopic systems - a harmonically-trapped Brownian particle and a quantum dot - we numerically determine the finite-time protocols that optimize the compromise between the standard deviation and the…
It is shown that the vacuum state of weakly interacting quantum field theories can be described, in the Heisenberg picture, as a linear combination of randomly distributed incoherent paths that obey classical equations of motion with…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…