The second law of thermodynamics in the quantum Brownian oscillator at an arbitrary temperature

Abstract

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 expected to change due to system-bath entanglement. Here we show analytically that the work needed to couple a single linear oscillator with finite strength to a bath cannot be less than the work obtainable from the oscillator when it decouples from the bath. Therefore, the quantum second law holds for an arbitrary temperature. This is a generalization of the previous results for zero temperature [1,2]; in the high temperature limit we recover the classical behavior.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in EPJ B

References in corpus (8)

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• Ground State Entanglement Energetics
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Quantum Thermodynamics: A Nonequilibrium Green's Functions Approach
• Thermodynamics of a subensemble of a canonical ensemble
• System-bath entanglement in nanothermodynamics
• Entropy Production in Quantum Brownian Motion
• Quantum thermodynamics of a charged magneto-oscillator coupled to a heat bath
• The Clausius inequality beyond the weak coupling limit: The quantum Brownian oscillator revisited
• Non-equilibrium dynamics in the quantum Brownian oscillator and the second law of thermodynamics
• Field-induced dynamics in the quantum Brownian oscillator: An exact treatment