Related papers: Quantum Brownian motion and the second law of ther…
Controlling heat flow at the quantum level is essential for the development of next-generation thermal devices. We investigate thermal rectification in a quantum harmonic oscillator coupled to two thermal baths via both single-photon…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
We introduce a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems, the simplest of quantum mechanical systems, undergoing quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths, respectively, at…
We establish that the exact quantum dynamics of a Brownian particle in the Caldeira-Leggett model can be mapped, at any temperature, onto a classical, non-Markovian stochastic process in phase space. Starting from a correlated thermal…
We present a self contained formalism modelled after the Brownian motion of a quantum harmonic oscillator for describing the performance of microscopic Brownian heat engines like Carnot, Stirling and Otto engines. Our theory, besides…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
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…
In d-dimensional lattices of coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, we analyze the heat current caused by two thermal baths of different temperature, which are coupled to opposite ends of the lattice, with focus on the validity of Fourier's…
A possible definition of the specific heat of open quantum systems is based on the reduced partition function of the system. For a free damped quantum particle, it has been found that under certain conditions, this specific heat can become…
For open quantum systems coupled to a thermal bath at inverse temperature $\beta$, it is well known that under the Born-, Markov-, and secular approximations the system density matrix will approach the thermal Gibbs state with the bath…
Recently, model systems with quadratic Hamiltonians and time-dependent interactions were studied by Briegel and Popescu and by Galve et al. in order to consider the possibility of both quantum refrigeration in enzymes [Proc. R. Soc. 469…
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…
We study properties of steady states (states with time-independent density operators) of systems of coupled harmonic oscillators. Formulas are derived showing how adiabatic change of the Hamiltonian transforms one steady state into another.…
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…
Within a microscopic theory, we study the quantum Brownian motion of a skyrmion in a magnetic insulator coupled to a bath of magnon-like quantum excitations. The intrinsic skyrmion-bath coupling gives rise to damping terms for the skyrmion…
With this work we elaborate on the physics of quantum noise in thermal equilibrium and in stationary non-equilibrium. Starting out from the celebrated quantum fluctuation-dissipation theorem we discuss some important consequences that must…
We study analytically the probability distribution of the heat released by an ensemble of harmonic oscillators to the thermal bath, in the nonequilibrium relaxation process following a temperature quench. We focus on the asymmetry…
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…
The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…
We present a detailed study of the quantum dissipative dynamics of a charged particle in a magnetic field. Our focus of attention is the effect of dissipation on the low- and high-temperature behavior of the specific heat at constant…