Related papers: Quantum measurement of work in mesoscopic systems
The separation of internal energy into heat and work in quantum thermodynamics is a controversial issue for a long time, and we revisit and solve this problem in this work. It is shown that the Hamiltonian plays dual roles for a quantum…
Non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics is essential to describe new devices that operate far from the regime where the usual thermodynamical laws are obeyed. When quantum fluctuations dominate, defining and measuring work and heat, two…
In order to understand the Landau-Lifshitz conjecture on the relationship between quantum measurements and the thermodynamic second law, we discuss the notion of ``diabatic'' and ``adiabatic'' forces exerted by the quantum object on the…
Quantum transport in mesoscopic conductors is essentially governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. One of the major open questions of quantum mechanics is what happens if non-commuting observables are measured simultaneously. Since…
In this paper we give a pedagogical introduction to the ideas of quantum thermodynamics and work fluctuations, using only basic concepts from quantum and statistical mechanics. After reviewing the concept of work, as usually taught in…
The effects of any quantum measurement can be described by a collection of measurement operators {M_m} acting on the quantum state of the measured system. However, the Hilbert space formalism tends to obscure the relationship between the…
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…
We discuss work performed on a quantum two-level system coupled to multiple thermal baths. To evaluate the work, a measurement of photon exchange between the system and the baths is envisioned. In a realistic scenario, some photons remain…
The control of individual quantum systems is now a reality in a variety of physical settings. Feedback control is an important class of control methods because of its ability to reduce the effects of noise. In this review we give an…
Irreversibility is often considered to characterize measurements in quantum mechanics. Fundamental problems with this characterization are addressed. First, whether a measurement is made in quantum mechanics is an arbitrary decision on the…
This paper develops an agent-centric account of measurement that treats the preferred-basis problem is fundamentally perspectival. On this view, the system--apparatus--environment decomposition and the observables that are apt to become…
We present an exact derivation of a process in which a microscopic measured system interacts with "heat bath" and pointer modes of a measuring device, via a linear coupling involving Hermitian operator $\Lambda$ of the system. In the limit…
We study the functioning of a three-level thermal machine when acting on a many-qubit system, the entire system being placed in an electromagnetic field in a stationary out-of-thermal-equilibrium configuration. This realistic setup stands…
Quantum operations describe any state change allowed in quantum mechanics, including the evolution of an open system or the state change due to a measurement. In this letter we present a general method based on quantum tomography for…
A central building block of a heat engine is the working fluid, which mediates the conversion of heat into work. In nanoscale heat engines, the working fluid can be a quantum system whose behavior and dynamics are non-classical. A…
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…
A measuring apparatus is described by quantum mechanics while it interacts with the quantum system under observation, and then it must be given a classical description so that the result of the measurement appears as objective reality.…
A model for the thermodynamics of a quantum heat bath is introduced. Under the assumption that the bath molecules have finitely many degrees of freedom and are weakly interacting, we present a general derivation of the equation of state of…
The paper discusses dynamics of quantum measurements in mesoscopic solid-state systems. The aim is to show how the general ideas of the quantum measurement theory play out in the realistic models of actual mesoscopic detectors. The two…
Modern technologies could soon make it possible to investigate the operation cycles of quantum heat engines by counting the photons that are emitted and absorbed by their working systems. Using the quantum jump approach to open-system…