No energy transport without discord

Abstract

We show that without quantum correlations, energy cannot flow. The result follows from a simple theorem that shows that systems whose dynamics do not generate quantum discord are effectively non-interacting. We show that the rate of heat transfer between two quantum systems at different temperatures is directly proportional to the instantaneous rate of increase of diagonal/energetic discord between the systems. Consequently, nanoscale heat transfer experiments can be used to measure discord directly. We report the results of a measurement of the increase in discord due to nanoscale heat flow across an aluminum-sapphire interface and find it to be $4.28\times 10^{24}$ $\mathrm{bits}{\mathrm{m}}^{-2}{\mathrm{K}}^{-1}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$.

7 pages, 1 figure; v2: significantly rewritten, more results added

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Resource Destroying Maps
• One-Shot Operational Quantum Resource Theory
• Correlations in quantum thermodynamics: Heat, work, and entropy production
• Quantifying precision loss in local quantum thermometry via diagonal discord
• Mutual Information is not a Reliable Measure for Variations in Total Correlations
• Correlation-Enabled Energy Exchange in Quantum Systems without External Driving
• Second law of thermodynamics with quantum memory
• A measure of quantum correlations that lies approximately between entanglement and discord
• The sudden change phenomenon of quantum discord