Related papers: Friendly units for coldness
In statistical mechanics, entropy is defined as a fundamental quantity. However, its unit, J/K, involves that of temperature, which is only subsequently defined - and defined in terms of entropy. This circularity arises with the…
Information theory this century has clarified the 19th century work of Gibbs, and has shown that natural units for temperature kT, defined via 1/T=dS/dE, are energy per nat of information uncertainty. This means that (for any system) the…
Temperature scale and the Boltzmann constant: The newest system of units is based on a compatible set of natural constants with fixed values. An example is the Boltzmann constant k which defines the thermal energy content kT. To express the…
Temperature is usually defined for physical systems at thermal equilibrium. Nevertheless one may wonder if it would be possible to attribute a meaningful notion of temperature to an arbitrary quantum state, beyond simply the thermal (Gibbs)…
We illustrate in terms familiar to modern day science students that: (i) an uncertainty slope mechanism underlies the usefulness of temperature via its reciprocal, which is incidentally around 42 [nats/eV] at the freezing point of water;…
We consider the temperature fluctuations of a small object. Classical fluctuations of the temperature have been considered for a long time. Using the Nyquist approach, we show that the temperature of an object fluctuates when in a thermal…
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility, robustness and optimization of introducing personal comfort systems (PCS), apparatuses that promises in energy saving and comfort improvement, into a broader range of environments. We report a…
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…
We propose the use of a quantum thermal machine for low-temperature thermometry. A hot thermal reservoir coupled to the machine allows for simultaneously cooling the sample while determining its temperature without knowing the…
The equivalence of 1 bit of information to entropy was given by Landauer in 1961 as kln2, k the Boltzmann constant. Erasing information implies heat dissipation and the energy of 1 bit would then be (the Landauers limit) kT ln 2, T being…
Single-qubit thermometry presents the simplest tool to measure the temperature of thermal baths with reduced invasivity. At thermal equilibrium, the temperature uncertainty is linked to the heat capacity of the qubit, however the best…
Temperature determines the relative probability of observing a physical system in an energy state when that system is energetically in equilibrium with its environment. In this paper, we present a theory for engineering the temperature of a…
We consider blocks of quantum spins in a chain at thermal equilibrium, focusing on their properties from a thermodynamical perspective. Whereas in classical systems the temperature behaves as an intensive magnitude, a deviation from this…
Refrigeration limits are of fundamental and practical importance. We here show that quantum systems can be cooled below existing incoherent cooling bounds by employing coherent virtual qubits, even if the amount of coherence is incompletely…
It is often the case that the environment of a quantum system may be described as a bath of oscillators with Ohmic density of states. In turn, the precise characterization of these classes of environments is a crucial tool to engineer…
We investigate the consequences of information exchange between a system and a measurement-feedback apparatus that cools the system below the environmental temperature. A quantitative relationship between entropy pumping and information…
A theoretical proposal that Coulomb-coupled quantum dots can be used as quantum probes to determine the temperature of a sample (i.e., an electronic reservoir) is proposed. Through the regulation of the positive or negative voltage bias in…
A classical thermometer typically works by exchanging energy with the system being measured until it comes to equilibrium, at which point the readout is related to the final energy state of the thermometer. A recent paper noted that…
Among all the freezing transitions, that of water into ice is probably the most relevant to biology, physics, geology or atmospheric science. In this work we investigate homogeneous ice nucleation by means of computer simulations. We…
Cold atomic gases provide a remarkable testbed to study the physics of interacting many-body quantum systems. They have started to play a major role as quantum simulators, given the high degree of control that is possible. A crucial element…