Related papers: Work Sum Rule for Open Quantum Systems
Despite its enormous empirical success, the formalism of quantum theory still raises fundamental questions: why is nature described in terms of complex Hilbert spaces, and what modifications of it could we reasonably expect to find in some…
One of the fundamental questions in quantum thermodynamics concerns the decomposition of energetic changes into heat and work. Contrary to classical engines, the entropy change of the piston cannot be neglected in the quantum domain. As a…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
Entropy generation in quantum sytems is tied to the existence of a nonclassical environment (heat bath or other) with which the system interacts. The continuous `measuring' of the open system by its environment induces decoherence of its…
We propose a configuration of a single three-level quantum emitter embedded in a non-equilibrium steady electromagnetic environment, able to stabilize and control the local temperatures of a target system it interacts with, consisting of a…
The resource-theoretic approach to quantum thermodynamics assumes complete knowledge of the thermal equilibrium against which thermodynamic resources are defined. In practice, however, this state is determined by the system Hamiltonian and…
Despite the coined quantum walk being a closed quantum system under a unitary evolution, its Hilbert space can be divided in two sub-spaces, which makes it possible for one to analyze one of the subsystems (the coin or the walker) as an…
A pedagogical derivation of statistical mechanics from quantum mechanics is provided, by means of open quantum systems. Besides, a new definition of Boltzmann entropy for a quantum closed system is also given to count microstates in a way…
The statistics of work done on a quantum system can be quantified by the two-point measurement scheme. We show how the Shannon entropy of the work distribution admits a general upper bound depending on the initial diagonal entropy, and a…
A pure quantum state can fully describe thermal equilibrium as long as one focuses on local observables. Thermodynamic entropy can also be recovered as the entanglement entropy of small subsystems. When the size of the subsystem increases,…
We consider the generic model of a finite-size quantum electron system connected to two (temperature and particle) reservoirs. The quantum open system is driven out of equilibrium by the presence of both a temperature and a chemical…
It is shown how information contained in the pairwise correlations (in general, partial) between atoms of a gas can be used to completely convert heat taken from a thermostat into mechanical work in a process of relaxation of the system to…
The quantum ergotropy quantifies the maximal amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum state without changing its entropy. Given that the ergotropy can be expressed as the difference of quantum and classical relative entropies of…
Recent studies have pointed out the intrinsic dependence of figures of merit of thermodynamic relevance -- such as work, heat and entropy production -- on the amount of quantum coherences that is made available to a system. However, whether…
Control of open quantum systems is an essential ingredient to the realization of contemporary quantum science and technology. We demonstrate such control by employing a thermodynamically consistent framework, taking into account the fact…
We consider the task of extracting work from quantum systems in the resource theory perspective of thermodynamics, where free states are arbitrary thermal states, and allowed operations are energy conserving unitary transformations. Taking…
The classical thermostatics of equilibrium processes is shown to possess a quantum-mechanical dual theory with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space of quantum states. Specifically, the kernel of a certain Hamiltonian operator becomes the…
The evaluation of the specific heat of an open, damped quantum system is a subtle issue. One possible route is based on the thermodynamic partition function which is the ratio of the partition functions of system plus bath and of the bath…
We set up a framework for quantum stochastic thermodynamics based solely on experimentally controllable, but otherwise arbitrary interventions at discrete times. Using standard assumptions about the system-bath dynamics and insights from…
We carefully examine the thermodynamic consequences of the repeated partial projection model for coupling a quantum system to an arbitrary series of environments under feedback control. This paper provides observational definitions of heat…