Related papers: Thermal operations from informational equilibrium
Thermal operations are an operational model of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics. In the absence of coherence between energy levels, exact state transition conditions under thermal operations are known in terms of a mathematical…
We introduce the resource-theoretic free energy of a quantum channel as the maximal work extractable from the channel as its output equilibrates to a thermal state and its reference system remains locally intact. It is proportional to the…
Information is instrumental in our understanding of thermodynamics. Their interplay has been studied through completely degenerate Hamiltonians whereby the informational contributions to thermodynamic transformations can be isolated. In…
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…
Signaling quantum channels are fundamental to quantum communication, enabling the transfer of information from input to output states. In contrast, thermalisation erases information about the initial state. This raises a crucial question:…
When a physical system is put in contact with a very large thermal bath, it undergoes a dissipative (i.e., an apparently irreversible) process that leads to thermal equilibrium. This dynamical process can be described fully within quantum…
Environments in quantum thermodynamics usually take the role of heat baths. These baths are Markovian, weakly coupled to the system, and initialized in a thermal state. Whenever one of these properties is missing, standard quantum…
Quantum thermodynamics can be understood as a resource theory, whereby thermal states are free and the only allowed operations are unitary transformations commuting with the total Hamiltonian of the system. Previous literature on the…
The thermodynamic resourcefulness of quantum channels primarily depends on their underlying causal structure and their ability to generate quantum correlations. We quantify this interplay within the resource theory of athermality for…
A many-body system, whether in contact with a large environment or evolving under complex dynamics, can typically be modeled as occupying the thermal state singled out by Jaynes' maximum entropy principle. Here, we find analogous…
Modeling communication channels as thermal systems results in Hamiltonians which are an explicit function of the temperature. The first two authors have recently generalized the second thermodynamic law to encompass systems with…
A general tool for description of open quantum systems is given by the formalism of quantum operations. Most important of them are trace-preserving maps also known as quantum channels. We discuss those conditions on quantum channels under…
Quantum phases at zero temperature can be characterized as equivalence classes under local unitary transformations: two ground states within a gapped phase can be transformed into each other via a local unitary circuit. We generalize this…
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…
Thermal operations are a generic description for allowed state transitions under thermodynamic restrictions. However, the quest for simpler methods to encompass all these processes remains unfulfilled. We resolve this challenge through the…
In this article we explore the set of thermal operations from a mathematical and topological point of view. First we introduce the concept of Hamiltonians with resonant spectrum with respect to some reference Hamiltonian, followed by…
The release of causal structure of physical events from a well-defined order to an indefinite one stimulates remarkable enhancements in various quantum information tasks. Some of these advantages, however, are questioned for the ambiguous…
Irreversibility, crucial in both thermodynamics and information theory, is naturally studied by comparing the evolution -- the (forward) channel -- with an associated reverse -- the reverse channel. There are two natural ways to define this…
So-called Thermal Operations seem to describe the most fundamental, and reasonable, set of operations allowable for state transformations at an ambient inverse temperature $\beta$. However, a priori, they require experimentalists to…
The study of thermal operations allows one to investigate the ultimate possibilities of quantum states and of nanoscale thermal machines. Whilst fairly general, these results typically do not apply to continuous variable systems and do not…