Related papers: Quantum thermodynamics for general bipartite inter…
The consistent definition of the thermodynamic functions of small open quantum systems in contact with an environment in equilibrium with a heat bath has been the subject of many debates in the quantum community. In the present work we…
Microscopic thermal machines promise to play an important role in future quantum technologies. Making such devices widely applicable will require effective strategies to channel their output into easily accessible storage systems like…
Recent advances in applying thermodynamic ideas to quantum systems have raised the novel prospect of using non-thermal, non-classical sources of energy, of purely quantum origin, like quantum statistics, to extract mechanical work in…
Technological and scientific advances have given rise to an era in which coherent quantum-mechanical phenomena can be probed and experimentally-realised over unprecedented timescales in condensed matter physics. In turn, scientific interest…
A large class of isolated quantum system in a pure state can equilibrate and serve as a heat bath. We show that once the equilibrium is reached, any of its subsystems that is much smaller than the isolated system is thermalized such that…
Extending the quantum formulation of [Phys. Rev. X 3, 041003 (2013)] to a more general setting for studying the thermodynamics of information processing including initial correlations, we generalize the second law of thermodynamics to…
Quantum thermalization describes how closed quantum systems can effectively reach thermal equilibrium, resolving the apparent incongruity between the reversibility of Schr\"odinger's equation and the second law of thermodynamics. Despite…
We investigate the link between information and thermodynamics embodied by Landauer's principle in the open dynamics of a multipartite quantum system. Such irreversible dynamics is described in terms of a collisional model with a finite…
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…
Understanding how coherence of quantum systems affects thermodynamic quantities, such as work and heat, is essential for harnessing quantumness effectively in thermal quantum technologies. Here, we study the unique contributions of quantum…
Thermalization in closed quantum systems can be explained either by means of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis or the concept of canonical typicality. Both concepts are based on quantum mechanical formalism such as spectral…
We show how statistical thermodynamics can be formulated in situations in which thermodynamics applies, while equilibrium statistical mechanics does not. A typical case is, in the words of Landau and Lifshitz, that of partial (or…
Thermodynamics relies on the possibility to describe systems composed of a large number of constituents in terms of few macroscopic variables. Its foundations are rooted into the paradigm of statistical mechanics, where thermal properties…
Thermodynamic principles are often deceptively simple and yet surprisingly powerful. We show how a simple rule, such as the net flow of energy in and out of a moving atom under nonequilibrium steady state condition, can expose the…
The thermodynamics of small quantum many-body systems strongly coupled to a heat bath at low temperatures with non-Markovian behavior are new challenges for quantum thermodynamics, as traditional thermodynamics is built on large systems…
Understanding thermodynamics far from equilibrium at the quantum scale remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in the presence of quantum coherence. Here we develop a first-principles framework for nonequilibrium quantum…
In this paper, unambiguous redefinitions of heat and work are presented for quantum thermodynamic systems. We will use genuine reasoning based on which Clausius originally defined work and heat in establishing thermodynamics. The change in…
Recent understanding of the thermodynamics of small-scale systems have enabled the characterization of the thermodynamic requirements of implementing quantum processes for fixed input states. Here, we extend these results to construct…
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…
We treat a quantum mechanical system with certain general properties which are expected to be common in macroscopic quantum systems. Starting from a PURE initial state (which may not describe an equilibrium) in which energy is mildly…