Related papers: A hierarchy of thermodynamically consistent quantu…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
Thermal channels -- the free processes allowed in the resource theory of quantum thermodynamics -- are generalised to thermal instruments, which we interpret as implementing thermodynamically free quantum measurements; a Maxwellian demon…
Quantum decoherence is seen as an undesired source of irreversibility that destroys quantum resources. Quantum coherences seem to be a property that vanishes at thermodynamic equilibrium. Away from equilibrium, quantum coherences challenge…
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…
Thermodynamics is the phenomenological theory of heat and work. Here we analyze to what extent quantum thermodynamic relations are immune to the underlying mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. As a main result, we show that the…
Completely positive trace preserving maps are essential for the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. The dynamics of quantum systems, correlated with their environments, are in general not described by such maps. We explore how…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
Quantum coherence is a fundamental aspect of quantum physics and plays a central role in quantum information science. This essential property of the quantum states could be fragile under the influence of the quantum operations. The extent…
Operational quantum stochastic thermodynamics is a recently proposed theory to study the thermodynamics of open systems based on the rigorous notion of a quantum stochastic process or quantum causal model. In there, a stochastic trajectory…
Quantum thermodynamics supplies a consistent description of quantum heat engines and refrigerators up to the level of a single few level system coupled to the environment. Once the environment is split into three;a hot, cold and work…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
Quantum coherence is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and an underlying requirement for most quantum information tasks. In the resource theory of coherence, incoherent states are diagonal with respect to a fixed orthonormal basis,…
We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in…
The aim of this book chapter is to indicate how quantum phenomena are affecting the operation of microscopic thermal machines, such as engines and refrigerators. As converting heat to work is one of the fundamental concerns in…
A long-standing problem in quantum mesoscopic physics is which operator order corresponds to noise expressions like <I(-\omega)I(\omega)>, where I(\omega) is the measured current at frequency \omega. Symmetrized order describes a classical…
The Principle of Unattainability rules out the attainment of absolute zero temperature by any finite physical means, no matter how idealised they could be. Nevertheless, we clarify that the Third Law of Thermodynamics, as defined by…
In thermodynamics, quantum coherences - superpositions between energy eigenstates - behave in distinctly nonclassical ways. Recently mathematical frameworks have emerged to account for these features and have provided a range of novel…
Quantum coherence and quantum correlations lie in the center of quantum information science, since they both are considered as fundamental reasons for significant features of quantum mechanics different from classical mechanics. We present…
The measurement postulate of quantum theory stands in conflict with the laws of thermodynamics and has evoked debate regarding what actually constitutes a measurement. With the help of modern quantum statistical mechanics, we take the first…
Heat flow between a large ``bath'' and a smaller system brings them progressively closer to thermal equilibrium while increasing their entropy. Deviations from this trend are fluctuations involving a small fraction of a statistical ensemble…