Related papers: The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivabl…
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…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. Of particular practical relevance…
The problem of possible violation of the second law of thermodynamics is discussed. It is noted that the task of the well known challenge to the second law called Maxwell's demon is put in order a chaotic perpetual motion and if any ordered…
We report two results complementing the second law of thermodynamics for Markovian open quantum systems coupled to multiple reservoirs with different temperatures and chemical potentials. First, we derive a nonequilibrium free energy…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic observables, such as heat and work, contain relevant information on the underlying physical process. These fluctuations are however not taken into account in the traditional laws of thermodynamics. While the…
We define thermodynamic configurations and identify two primitives of discrete quantum processes between configurations for which heat and work can be defined in a natural way. This allows us to uncover a general second law for any discrete…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
We propose a setup based on two coupled quantum dots where thermodynamics of a measurement can be quantitatively characterized. The information obtained in the measurement can be utilized by performing feedback in a manner apparently…
The concept of thermal machines has evolved from the canonical steam engine to the recently proposed nanoscopic quantum systems as working fluids. The latter obey quantum open system dynamics and frequently operate in non-equilibrium…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
It is possible to extract work from a quantum-mechanical system whose dynamics is governed by a time-dependent cyclic Hamiltonian. An energy bath is required to operate such a quantum engine in place of the heat bath used to run a…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
In this work, we investigate the heat flow of two interacting quantum systems on the perspective of noncommutativity phase-space effects and show that by controlling the new constants introduced in the quantum theory, due to a deformed…
It is nearly 150 years since Maxwell challenged the validity of the second law of thermodynamics by imagining a tiny creature who could sort the molecules of a gas in such a way that would decrease entropy without exerting any work. The…
We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…
Accurately describing work extraction from a quantum system is a central objective for the extension of thermodynamics to individual quantum systems. The concepts of work and heat are surprisingly subtle when generalizations are made to…
In quantum systems which satisfy the hypothesis of equal weights for eigenstates [4], the maximum work principle (for extremely slow and relatively fast operation) is derived by using quantum dynamics alone. This may be a crucial step in…
A version of the second law of thermodynamics states that one cannot lower the energy of an isolated system by a cyclic operation. We prove this law without introducing statistical ensembles and by resorting only to quantum mechanics. We…
The efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound. This bound follows from the second law of thermodynamics and is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the…
Interactions of quantum systems with their environment play a crucial role in resource-theoretic approaches to thermodynamics in the microscopic regime. Here, we analyze the possible state transitions in the presence of "small" heat baths…