Related papers: Quantum non-Markovianity, quantum coherence and ex…
Constructing optimal thermodynamic processes in quantum systems relies on managing the balance between the average excess work and its stochastic fluctuations. Recently it has been shown that two different quantum generalisations of…
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…
Many studies of quantum-size heat engines assume that the dynamics of an internal system is unitary and that the extracted work is equal to the energy loss of the internal system. Both assumptions, however, should be under scrutiny. In the…
Understanding the fundamental constraint on work far beyond the adiabatic regime is crucial to investigating fast and efficient energy extraction or consumption processes. In this study, we derive thermodynamic speed limits for…
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…
Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
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…
The universal quantum work relation connects a functional of an arbitrary observable averaged over the forward process to the free energy difference and another functional averaged over the time-reversed process. Here, we ask the question…
The minimal-coupling quantum heat engine is a thermal machine consisting of an explicit energy storage system, heat baths, and a working body, which alternatively couples to subsystems through discrete strokes -- energy-conserving two-body…
The role of quantum entanglement in thermodynamical systems remains elusive. Does entanglement result in thermodynamic advantages or does it impose fundamental limitations? Here, we unambiguously quantify the amount of heat and work in a…
Entropy production is a fundamental concept that plays a crucial role in the second law of thermodynamics and the measure of irreversibility. It imposes rigorous constraints on the kinds of transformations allowed in thermodynamic…
We employ the operational quasiprobability (OQ) as a work distribution, which reproduces the Jarzynski equality and yields the average work consistent with the classical definition. The OQ distribution can be experimentally implemented…
We identify a connection between quantum coherence and the maximum extractable work from a quantum battery, and to this end, we define the coherence-constrained maximal work (CCMW) as the highest amount of work extractable via…
We investigate fundamental connections between thermodynamics and quantum information theory. First, we show that the operational framework of thermal operations is nonequivalent to the framework of Gibbs-preserving maps, and we comment on…
In open quantum systems, a clear distinction between work and heat is often challenging, and extending the quantum Jarzynski equality to systems evolving under general quantum channels beyond unitality remains an open problem in quantum…
Classical thermodynamics is built with the concept of equilibrium states. However, it is less clear how equilibrium thermodynamics emerges through the dynamics that follows the principle of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we develop a…
An attempt toward the operational formulation of quantum thermodynamics is made by employing the recently proposed operations forming positive operator-valued measures for generating thermodynamic processes. The quantity of heat as well as…
Thermodynamics was developed in the XIXth century to provide a physical description to engines and other macroscopic thermal machines. Since then, progress in nanotechnologies urged to extend these formalism, initially designed for…
We establish the foundations of a nonequilibrium theory of quantum thermodynamics for noninteracting open quantum systems strongly coupled to their reservoirs within the framework of the nonequilibrium Green functions (NEGF). The energy of…