相关论文: Minimal work principle: proof and counterexamples

The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…

The approach to equilibrium for systems interacting with their environment by being regularly exposed to low energy, low intensity pulses of some type of quanta is studied. Assuming a randomness condition on the interaction of these quanta…

Adiabatic reverse annealing (ARA) is an improvement to conventional quantum annealing (QA) that uses an initial guess at the desired ground state to circumvent problematic phase transitions. Despite encouraging results in the closed-system…

Recent years have seen an enormously revived interest in the study of thermodynamic notions in the quantum regime. This applies both to the study of notions of work extraction in thermal machines in the quantum regime, as well as to…

Adiabaticity is a cornerstone of many promising approaches to quantum control, computing, and simulation. In practice, however, there is always a trade-off. Although the deleterious effects of noise can be diminished by running a control…

We study the physics of quantum phase transitions from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. For first order quantum phase transitions, we find that the average work done per quench in crossing the critical point is…

It is generally believed that a generic system can be reversibly transformed from one state into another by sufficiently slow change of parameters. A standard argument favoring this assertion is based on a possibility to expand the energy…

We investigate the equilibration of an isolated macroscopic quantum system in the sense that deviations from a steady state become unmeasurably small for the overwhelming majority of times within any sufficiently large time interval. The…

Adiabatic (or reversible) processes are the key concept unifying our understanding of thermodynamics and dynamical systems. Reversibility in the thermodynamic sense is understood as entropy-preserving processes, such as in the idealized…

A thermally isolated quantum system undergoes unitary evolution by interacting with an external work source. The two-point energy measurement (TPM) protocol defines the work exchanged between the system and the work source by performing…

Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…

Accurate information processing is crucial both in technology and in nature. To achieve it, any information processing system needs an initial supply of resources away from thermal equilibrium. Here we establish a fundamental limit on the…

In this paper we study the problem of the existence of a least-action principle for invertible, second-order dynamical systems, discrete in time and space. We show that, when the configuration space is finite, a least-action principle does…

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…

The goal of thermodynamic optimal control theory is to find protocols to change the state of a system from an initial to a desired final distribution, within a finite time, with the least possible expenditure of work. The optimal protocol…

Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…

Quantum decoherence is of primary importance for relaxation to an equilibrium distribution and, accordingly, for equilibrium processes. We demonstrate how coherence breaking implies evolution to a microcanonical distribution…

The competition between evolution time, interaction strength, and temperature challenges our understanding of many-body quantum systems out-of-equilibrium. Here we consider a benchmark system, the Hubbard dimer, which allows us to explore…

A gapped quantum system that is adiabatically perturbed remains approximately in its eigenstate after the evolution. We prove that, for constant gap, general quantum processes that approximately prepare the final eigenstate require a…

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…