相关论文: Second Law of Thermodynamics with Discrete Quantum…

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…

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…

The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…

Response lags are generic to almost any physical system and often play a crucial role in the feedback loops present in artificial nanodevices and biological molecular machines. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of small…

Quantum correlation, or entanglement, is now believed to be an indispensable physical resource for certain tasks in quantum information processing, for which classically correlated states cannot be useful. Besides information processing,…

Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…

The classical thermodynamic laws fail to capture the behavior of systems with energy Hamiltonian which is an explicit function of the temperature. Such Hamiltonian arises, for example, in modeling information processing systems, like…

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…

We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…

We derive a bound on the efficiency of thermal engines that can be sharper than Carnot's limit. It is a function of statistical correlations between the engine internal state and Hamiltonian, can be saturated even in finite-time cycles, and…

We investigate the quantum thermodynamic cycle of a quantum heat engine carrying out an Otto thermodynamic cycle. We use the thermal properties of a moving heat bath with relativistic velocity with respect to the cold bath. As a working…

Thermodynamic behaviors in a quantum Brownian motion coupled to a classical heat bath is studied. We then define a heat operator by generalizing the stochastic energetics and show the energy balance (first law) and the upper bound of the…

We establish quantum thermodynamics for open quantum systems weakly coupled to their reservoirs when the system exhibits degeneracies. The first and second law of thermodynamics are derived, as well as a finite-time fluctuation theorem for…

The energy conversion efficiency of far-from-equilibrium systems is generally limited by irreversible thermodynamic fluxes that make contact with different heat baths. For complex systems, the states of the maximum efficiency and the…

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…

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…

We show that work can be extracted from a two-level system (spin) coupled to a bosonic thermal bath. This is possible due to different initial temperatures of the spin and the bath, both positive (no spin population inversion) and is…

Considering a general microscopic model for a quantum measuring apparatus comprising a quantum probe coupled to a thermal bath, we analyze the energetic resources necessary for the realization of a quantum measurement, which includes the…

Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…

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…