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Related papers: Thermodynamic work and heat for a quantum process:…

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Assigning the variations of internal energy into heat or work contributions is a challenging task due to the fact that these properties are trajectory dependent. A number of proposals have been put forward for open quantum systems following…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-09-01 Adrián Juan-Delgado , Aurélia Chenu

Free energy fixes the maximum work of a thermodynamic process once the state and Hamiltonian are specified. A work-extraction task asks a different question: how much average work can a single device realize across several preparations and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-06 Sumit Rout , Aravinth Balaji Ravichandran , Paweł Horodecki , Anubhav Chaturvedi

It is possible to extract work from a quantum-mechanical system whose dynamics is governed by a time-dependent cyclic Hamiltonian. An energy bath is required to operate such a quantum engine in place of the heat bath used to run a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-07 C. M. Bender , D. C. Brody , B. K. Meister

Temperature is usually defined for physical systems at thermal equilibrium. Nevertheless one may wonder if it would be possible to attribute a meaningful notion of temperature to an arbitrary quantum state, beyond simply the thermal (Gibbs)…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-01 Patryk Lipka-Bartosik , Martí Perarnau-Llobet , Nicolas Brunner

We consider continuously monitored quantum systems and introduce definitions of work and heat along individual quantum trajectories that are valid for coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates. We use these quantities to extend the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-03-22 Jose Joaquin Alonso , Eric Lutz , Alessandro Romito

We investigate the thermodynamic behavior of open quantum systems through the Hamiltonian of Mean Force, focusing on two models: a two-qubit system interacting with a thermal bath and a Jaynes-Cummings Model without the rotating wave…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-03 Neha Pathania , Devvrat Tiwari , Subhashish Banerjee

The first law of thermodynamics restates the law of conservation of energy. It partitions the change in energy of a system into two pieces, heat and work. While there is no ambiguity to define heat and work in classical thermodynamics,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-01-19 Xue-Qun Yan , Yan-Jiao Du , Wen-Tao Hou , Xiao-Ming Liu

The quest to develop a general framework for thermodynamics, suitable for the regime of strong coupling and correlations between subsystems of an autonomous quantum "universe," has entailed diverging definitions for basic quantities,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-30 Luis Rodrigo Neves , Frederico Brito

We discuss the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by a change in a control parameter and undergoing a unitary process. We compare the work actually done on the system with the one that would be performed…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-01-20 F. Plastina , A. Alecce , T. J. G. Apollaro , G. Falcone , G. Francica , F. Galve , N. Lo Gullo , R. Zambrini

The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-17 Patrick P. Potts

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-09-29 Paul Skrzypczyk , Anthony J. Short , Sandu Popescu

Traditional quantum thermodynamic frameworks associate work to energy exchanges induced by unitary transformations generated by external controls, and heat to energy exchanges induced by bath interaction. Recently, a framework was…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-06 Tiago F. F. Santos , Camille Latune

We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-05-31 Alessandra Colla , Heinz-Peter Breuer

We introduce a new quantum heat engine, in which the working medium is a quantum system with a discrete level and a continuum. Net work done by this engine is calculated and discussed. The results show that this quantum heat engine behaves…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-13 S. Li , H. Wang , Y. D. Sun , X. X. Yi

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-23 Joan Alba , Laura Ares , Jan Sperling , Julien Pinske

Underlying the classical thermodynamic principles are analogous microscopic laws, arising from the fundamental axioms of quantum mechanics. These define quantum thermodynamic variables such as quantum work and heat and characterize the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-05-03 Roie Dann , Ronnie Kosloff

Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-29 Cyril Elouard , Camille Lombard Latune

We provide a characterization of energy in the form of exchanged heat and work between two interacting constituents of a closed, bipartite, correlated quantum system. By defining a binding energy we derive a consistent quantum formulation…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-10-25 S. Alipour , F. Benatti , F. Bakhshinezhad , M. Afsary , S. Marcantoni , A. T. Rezakhani

Quantum measurement is ultimately a physical process, resulting from an interaction between the measured system and a measuring apparatus. Considering the physical process of measurement within a thermodynamic context naturally raises the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-09 M. Hamed Mohammady

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-04-23 Jen-Tsung Hsiang , B. L. Hu