Related papers: Bath generated work extraction and inversion-free …

We consider multiple non-interacting quantum mechanical two-level systems coupled to a common bosonic bath and study its quantum phase transition with Monte Carlo simulations using a continuous imaginary time cluster algorithm. The common…

Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…

We show how work can be extracted from number-state coherence in a two-mode Bose-Einstein condensate. With careful tuning of parameters, a sequence of thermodynamically reversible steps transforms a Glauber coherent state into a thermal…

In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be…

We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…

An apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics occurs when an atom coupled to a zero-temperature bath, being necessarily in an excited state, is used to extract work from the bath. Here the fallacy is that it takes work to couple…

We present results for the dynamics of an impurity spin coupled to a magnetic field and to two ohmic baths which are out-of equilibrium due to the application of a bias voltage. Both the non-equilibrium steady state and the rate constants…

With the development of quantum thermodynamics it has been shown that relaxation to thermal equilibrium and with it the concept of heat flux may emerge directly from quantum mechanics. This happens for a large class of quantum systems if…

The Brownian motion of a harmonically bound quantum particle and coupled to a harmonic quantum bath is exactly solvable. At low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an entanglement with the bath. This happens when…

We study how Thomson's formulation of the second law: no work is extracted from an equilibrium ensemble by a cyclic process, emerges in the quantum situation through the averaging over fluctuations of work. The latter concept is carefully…

We report an anomalous decoherence phenomenon of a quantum dissipative system in the framework of a stochastic decoupling scheme along with a hierarchical equations-of-motion formalism without the usual Born-Markov or weak coupling…

Small quantum systems non-weakly coupled to a bath become in the quantum regime surrounded by a cloud of photons or phonons, which modifies their thermodynamic behavior. Exactly solvable examples are the Brownian motion of a quantum…

A suitable sequence of sharp pulses applied to a spin coupled to a bosonic bath can cool its state, i.e., increase its polarization or ground state occupation probability. Starting from an unpolarized state of the spin in equilibrium with…

We study the energy exchange between two bosonic systems that interact via bilinear transformations in the mode operators. The first mode is considered as the thermodynamic system, while the second is regarded as the bath. This work finds…

An attempt toward the operational formulation of quantum thermodynamics is made by employing the recently proposed operations forming positive operator-valued measures for generating thermodynamic processes. The quantity of heat as well as…

Motivated by understanding the emergence of thermodynamic restoring forces and oscillations, we develop a quantum-mechanical model of a bath of spins coupled to the elasticity of a material. We show our model reproduces the behavior of a…

We consider the time development of the density matrix for a system coupled to a thermal bath, in models that go beyond the standard two-level systems through addition of an energy excitation degree of freedom and through the possibility of…

We discuss the dynamics of a spin coupled to a damped harmonic oscillator. This system can be mapped to a spin-boson model with a structured bath, i.e. the spectral function of the bath has a resonance peak. We diagonalize the model by…

The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…

The spin-boson model, involving spins interacting with a bath of quantum harmonic oscillators, is a widely used representation of open quantum systems. Trapped ions present a natural platform for simulating the quantum dynamics of such…