Related papers: Entropy Flow at the Quantum Limit
The irreversible work during a driving protocol constitutes one of the most widely studied measures in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, as it constitutes a proxy for entropy production. In quantum systems, it has been shown that the…
The quantum potential is shown to result from the presence of a subtle thermal vacuum energy distributed across the whole domain of an experimental setup. Explicitly, its form is demonstrated to be exactly identical to the heat distribution…
The unavoidable irreversible losses of power in a heat engine are found to be of quantum origin. Following thermodynamic tradition a model quantum heat engine operating by the Otto cycle is analyzed. The working medium of the model is…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
In classical thermodynamics, heat must spontaneously flow from hot to cold systems. In quantum thermodynamics, the same law applies when considering multipartite product thermal states evolving unitarily. If initial correlations are…
Thermodynamics is based on a coarse-grained approach, from which its fundamental variables emerge, effectively erasing the complicate details of the microscopic dynamics within a macroscopic system. The strength of Thermodynamics lies in…
We consider thermal relaxation process of a quantum system attached to a single or multiple reservoirs. Quantifying the degree of irreversibility by entropy production, we prove that the irreversibility of the thermal relaxation is…
Let a general quantum many-body system at a low temperature adiabatically cross through the vicinity of the system's quantum critical point. We show that the system's temperature is significantly suppressed due to both the entropy…
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
We investigate fundamental connections between thermodynamics and quantum information theory. First, we show that the operational framework of thermal operations is nonequivalent to the framework of Gibbs-preserving maps, and we comment on…
Landauer's principle introduces a symmetry between computational and physical processes: erasure of information, a logically irreversible operation, must be underlain by an irreversible transformation dissipating energy. Monitoring micro-…
Enhancing the precision of a thermodynamic process inevitably necessitates a thermodynamic cost. This notion was recently formulated as the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, which states that the lower bound on the relative variance of…
We systematically explore and show the existence of finite-temperature continuous quantum phase transition (CTQPT) at a critical point, namely, during solidification or melting such that the first-order thermal phase transition is a special…
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…
Toward the formulation of the operational approach to quantum thermodynamics, the heat-up operator is explicitly constructed. This quantum operation generates for a generic system an irreversible transformation from a pure ground state at…
Quantum open systems evolve according to completely positive, trace preserving maps acting on the density operator, which can equivalently be unraveled in term of so-called quantum trajectories. These stochastic sequences of pure states…
It is often claimed, that from a quantum system of d levels, and entropy S and heat bath of temperature T one can draw kT(ln d -S) amount of work. However, the usual arguments based on Szilard engine are not fully rigorous. Here we prove…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
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…
We consider a situation where an $N$-level system (NLS) is coupled to a heat bath without being necessarily thermalized. For this situation we derive general Jarzinski-type equations and conclude that heat and entropy is flowing from the…