Related papers: Quantum work beyond classical (commuting) limits
Many work extraction or information erasure processes in the literature involve the raising and lowering of energy levels via external fields. But even if the actual system is treated quantum mechanically, the field is assumed to be…
Regarded as one of the most fundamental concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, work has received well-grounded definitions within the quantum framework since the 1970s, having being successfully applied to many contexts. Recent…
Quantum information science provides powerful technologies beyond the scope of classical physics. In practice, accurate control of quantum operations is a challenging task with current quantum devices. The implementation of high fidelity…
We determine the maximal work extractable via a cyclic Hamiltonian process from a positive-temperature ($T>0$) microcanonical state of a $N\gg 1$ spin bath. The work is much smaller than the total energy of the bath, but can be still much…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
The problem of sampling outputs of quantum circuits has been proposed as a candidate for demonstrating a quantum computational advantage (sometimes referred to as quantum "supremacy"). In this work, we investigate whether quantum advantage…
Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy…
The classical Jarzynski equality establishes an exact relation between the stochastic work performed on a system driven out of thermal equilibrium and the free energy difference in a corresponding quasi-static process. This fluctuation…
Giving a universal upper bound on the power output of heat engines is a long-standing open problem. We tackle this problem for generic quantum machines in self-contained formulation by carefully including the switching process of the…
We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body…
The concept of work is basic for statistical thermodynamics. To gain a fuller understanding of work and its (quantum) features, it needs to be represented as an average of a fluctuating quantity. Here I focus on the work done between two…
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 measurement of a system can change its mean energy, as well as entropy. A selective measurement (classical or quantum) can be used as a "Maxwell's demon" to power a single-temperature heat engine, by decreasing the entropy. Quantum…
Quantum thermodynamics is often formulated as a theory with constrained access to operations and resources. In this manuscript, we find a closed formula for the Gaussian ergotropy, i.e. the maximum energy that can be extracted from bosonic…
How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…
The paradigm of extracting work from isolated quantum system through a cyclic Hamiltonian process is a topic of immense research interest. The optimal work extracted under such process is termed as ergotropy [Europhys. Lett., 67 (4),…
Extending the quantum formulation of [Phys. Rev. X 3, 041003 (2013)] to a more general setting for studying the thermodynamics of information processing including initial correlations, we generalize the second law of thermodynamics to…
We study how the classical Hamilton's principal and characteristic functions are generated from the solutions of the quantum Hamilton-Jacobi equation. While in the classically forbidden regions these quantum quantities directly tend to the…
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…
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…