Related papers: The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivabl…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
A previously published model of the isothermal Maxwell demon as one of models of open quantum systems endowed with faculty of selforganization is reconstructed here. It describes an open quantum system interacting with a single…
The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…
This work provides an overview of key historical developments in the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, focusing on the notorious challenge of ``Maxwell's Demon'', a hypothetical creature who could presumably violate that law.…
A Maxwell's demon is a device that gets information and trades it in for thermodynamic advantage, in apparent (but not actual) contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. Quantum-mechanical versions of Maxwell's demon exhibit…
We consider a single harmonic oscillator coupled to a bath at zero temperature. As is well known, the oscillator then has a higher average energy than that given by its ground state. Here we show analytically that for a damping model with…
Although there is not a complete "proof" of the second law of thermo- dynamics based on microscopic dynamics, two properties of Hamiltonian systems have been used to prove the impossibility of work extraction from a single thermal…
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…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
In the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is a macroscopic physical law that states that in any isolated system, entropy can only increase and order, or organization, can only decrease. This means that in the long run, energy will always…
In this highly speculative Letter it is argued that, under certain physical conditions, Maxwell's demon might be capable of breaking the second law of thermodynamics, thereby allowing a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, by…
Following recent work by Marathe and Parrondo [PRL, 104, 245704 (2010)], we construct a classical Hamiltonian system whose energy is reduced during the adiabatic cycling of external parameters, when initial conditions are sampled…
Quantum dynamics controlled by a time-dependent coupling constant are studied. It is proven that an energy eigenstate expectation value of work done by the system in a quench process cannot exceed the work in the corresponding quasi-static…
The first law of thermodynamics restates the law of conservation of energy. It partitions the change in energy of a system into two pieces, heat and work. While there is no ambiguity to define heat and work in classical thermodynamics,…
Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…
The interplay between thermal machines and quantum correlations is of great interest in both quantum thermodynamics and quantum information science. Recently, a quantum Szil\'ard engine has been proposed, showing that the quantum…
Diverse models of engines energised by quantum-coherent, hence non-thermal, baths allow the engine efficiency to transgress the standard thermodynamic Carnot bound. These transgressions call for an elucidation of the underlying mechanisms.…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
The difference between quantum isoenergetic process and quantum isothermal process comes from the violation of the law of equipartition of energy in the quantum regime. To reveal an important physical meaning of this fact, here we study a…
Quantum thermodynamics investigates how robust the second law of thermodynamics serves as the unique fundamental law in the small quantum world. To tackle this problem, the quantum coherence constitutes a major difficulty of investigations,…