Related papers: The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivabl…
Mesoscopic thermoelectric heat engine is much anticipated as a device that allows us to utilize with high efficiency wasted heat inaccessible by conventional heat engines. However, the derivation of the heat current in this engine seems to…
The triumph of heat engines is their ability to convert the disordered energy of thermal sources into useful mechanical motion. In recent years, much effort has been devoted to generalizing thermodynamic notions to the quantum regime,…
We identify and interpret the possible quantum thermal machine regimes with a transverse-field Ising model as the working substance. In general, understanding the emergence of such regimes in a many-body quantum system is challenging due to…
In apparent contradiction to the laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon is able to cyclically extract work from a system in contact with a thermal bath exploiting the information about its microstate. The resolution of this paradox…
In the classical regime, thermodynamic state transformations are governed by the free energy. This is also called as the second law of thermodynamics. Previous works showed that, access to a catalytic system allows us to restore the second…
We investigate heat engines whose working substance is made of two coupled qubits performing a generalised Otto cycle by varying their applied magnetic field or their interaction strength during the compression and expansion strokes. During…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
Building on parallels between geometric quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, we explore an alternative basis for quantum thermodynamics that exploits the differential geometry of the underlying state space. We develop both…
We consider continuously monitored quantum systems and introduce definitions of work and heat along individual quantum trajectories that are valid for coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates. We use these quantities to extend the…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
The most succinct manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics is the limitation the Landauer principle imposes on the amount of heat a Maxwell demon (MD) can convert into free energy per single bit of information obtained in a…
A cyclic thermodynamic heat engine runs most efficiently if it is reversible. Carnot constructed such a reversible heat engine by combining adiabatic and isothermal processes for a system containing an ideal gas. Here, we present an example…
In this article, we briefly review dynamical and thermodynamical aspects of different forms of quantum motors and quantum pumps. We then extend previous results to provide new theoretical tools for a systematic study of those phenomena at…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
Quantum systems strongly coupled to many-body systems equilibrate to the reduced state of a global thermal state, deviating from the local thermal state of the system as it occurs in the weak-coupling limit. Taking this insight as a…
We investigate the performance of a quantum thermal machine operating in finite time based on shortcut-to-adiabaticity techniques. We compute efficiency and power for a quantum harmonic Otto engine by taking the energetic cost of the…
In this article it will be introduced a new theorem, can be considered a generalization of Hellmann-Feynman theorem[1]. The latter used in conjunction with the quantization of the free energy[2] of a quantum system allows to derive…
According to Clausius formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, for any thermal machine withdrawing heats $Q_{1,2}$ from two heat reservoirs at temperatures $T_{1,2}$, it holds $Q_1/T_1+Q_2/T_2 \leq 0$. Combined with the observation…
We propose a quantum analog of the internal combustion engine used in most cars. Specifically, we study how to implement the Otto-type quantum heat engine (QHE) with the assistance of a Maxwell's demon. Three steps are required:…
The quantum thermodynamic behavior of small systems is investigated in presence of finite quantum dissipation. We consider the archetype cases of a damped harmonic oscillator and a free quantum Brownian particle. A main finding is that…