Related papers: A quantum violation of the second law?

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…

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…

We consider a quantum harmonic oscillator linearly coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators and evaluate the degree of entanglement between system and bath using the negativity as an exact entanglement measure. We establish the existence…

Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…

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,…

The laws of thermodynamics, despite their wide range of applicability, are known to break down when systems are correlated with their environments. Here, we generalize thermodynamics to physical scenarios which allow presence of…

The first in a long series of papers by John T. Lewis, G. W. Ford and the present author, considered the problem of the most general coupling of a quantum particle to a linear passive heat bath, in the course of which they derived an exact…

In an Information machine system's dynamics gets affected by the attached information reservoir. Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for this case. In this article we have derived second law for an information machine,…

Quantum thermal states are known to be passive, as required by the second law of thermodynamics. This paper investigates the potential for work extraction by coupling a thermal bath to a qubit of either spin, fermionic, or topological type,…

A free particle coupled to a heat bath can exhibit a number of thermodynamic anomalies like a negative specific heat or reentrant classicality. These low-temperature phenomena are expected to be modified at very low temperatures where…

We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…

The meaning of temperature in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is considered by using a forced harmonic oscillator in a heat bath, where we have two effective temperatures for the position and the momentum, respectively. We invent a concrete…

Quantum thermodynamics addresses the emergence of thermodynamical laws from quantum mechanics. The link is based on the intimate connection of quantum thermodynamics with the theory of open quantum systems. Quantum mechanics inserts…

The temperature of an oscillator coupled to the vacuum state of a heat bath via ohmic coupling is non-zero, as measured by the reduced density matrix of the oscillator. This paper shows that the actual temperature, as measured by a…

We pointed out that the generalized second law of thermodynamics on a de Sitter universe whose energy density stochastically fluctuates due to quantum fluctuations is seemingly violated. We have shown that even in such a case, the…

Physical devices operating out of equilibrium are inherently affected by thermal fluctuations, limiting their operational precision. This issue is pronounced at microscopic and especially quantum scales and can only be mitigated by…

The authors of Ref. [1] claim to have experimental verification of violations of the second law of thermodynamics based on the assertions: (i) "for large systems and over long times the entropy production rate is necessarily positive"; (ii)…

We investigate the connection between recent results in quantum thermodynamics and fluctuation relations by adopting a fully quantum mechanical description of thermodynamics. By including a work system whose energy is allowed to fluctuate,…

The minimum work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for the adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is…

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…