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The entropy of a system gives a powerful insight into its microscopic degrees of freedom, however standard experimental ways of measuring entropy through heat capacity are hard to apply in mesoscale and nanoscale systems, as they require…
Stochastic thermodynamics extends classical thermodynamics to small systems in contact with one or more heat baths. It can account for the effects of thermal fluctuations and describe systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A basic…
Single molecules are nanoscale thermodynamic systems with few degrees of freedom. Thus, the knowledge of their entropy can reveal the presence of microscopic electron transfer dynamics, that are difficult to observe otherwise. Here, we…
We combine the formalisms of diagonal entropy and Jarzynski Equality to study the thermodynamic properties of closed quantum systems. Applying this approach to a quantum harmonic oscillator, the diagonal entropy offers a notion of…
Measuring the local temperature of nanoscale systems out of equilibrium has emerged as a new tool to study local heating effects and other local thermal properties of systems driven by external fields. Although various experimental…
We propose a fully operational framework to study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a quantum system $S$ that is coupled to a detector $D$ whose state is continuously monitored, allowing to single out individual quantum trajectories of…
The thermodynamic approach to non-equilibrium dynamics describes the state of macroscopic systems by means of a collection of intensities or intensive variables. The latter are by definition the differentials of the entropy with respect to…
Entropy is one of the key thermodynamic variables reflecting changes in the state of matter. Unlike other thermodynamic variables, it is well-defined also for nonequilibrium steady states through its relation to information. Applying this…
Measuring the temperature of a quantum system is an essential task in almost all aspects of quantum technologies. Theoretically, an optimal strategy for thermometry requires measuring energy which demands full accessibility over the entire…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics can provide strong advantages when compared to more standard equilibrium situations. Here, we present a general framework to study its application to concrete problems, which is valid also beyond the…
Estimating the temperature of a cold quantum system is difficult. Usually, one measures a well-understood thermal state and uses that prior knowledge to infer its temperature. In contrast, we introduce a method of thermometry that assumes…
We show that a local measurement of temperature and voltage for a quantum system in steady state, arbitrarily far from equilibrium, with arbitrary interactions within the system, is unique when it exists. This is interpreted as a…
Probes that measure the local thermal properties of systems out of equilibrium are emerging as new tools in the study of nanoscale systems. One can then measure the temperature of a probe that is weakly coupled to a bias-driven system. By…
We develop the stochastic approach to thermodynamics based on the stochastic dynamics, which can be discrete (master equation) continuous (Fokker-Planck equation), and on two assumptions concerning entropy. The first is the definition of…
Single-qubit thermometry presents the simplest tool to measure the temperature of thermal baths with reduced invasivity. At thermal equilibrium, the temperature uncertainty is linked to the heat capacity of the qubit, however the best…
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 review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
We investigate the sensing performance of a single-qubit quantum thermometer within a non-Markovian dynamical framework. By employing an exactly numerical hierarchical equations of the motion method, we go beyond traditional paradigms of…
Thermodynamics makes definite predictions about the thermal behavior of macroscopic systems in and out of equilibrium. Statistical mechanics aims to derive this behavior from the dynamics and statistics of the atoms and molecules making up…
We consider a question motivated by the third law of thermodynamics: can there be a local temperature arbitrarily close to absolute zero in a nonequilibrium quantum system? We consider nanoscale quantum conductors with the source reservoir…