Catalysis in Action via Elementary Thermal Operations

Abstract

We investigate catalysis in the framework of elementary thermal operations, leveraging the distinct features of such operations to illuminate catalytic dynamics. As groundwork, we establish new technical tools that enhance the computability of state transition rules for elementary thermal operations. Specifically, we provide a complete characterisation of state transitions for a qutrit system and special classes of initial states of arbitrary dimension. By employing these tools in conjunction with numerical methods, we find that by adopting a small catalyst, including just a qubit catalyst, one can significantly enlarge the set of state transitions for a qutrit system. This advancement notably narrows the gap of reachable states between elementary thermal operations and generic thermal operations. Furthermore, we decompose catalytic transitions into time-resolved evolution, which critically enables the tracking of nonequilibrium free energy exchanges between the system and bath. Our results provide evidence for the existence of simple and practicable catalytic advantage in thermodynamics while offering insight into analysing the mechanism of catalytic processes.

31+30 pages; 9 figures; added a new chapter (Ch. 4) on higher dimensional catalysts

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Entanglement generation from athermality
• Quantum catalysis in cavity quantum electrodynamics
• A hierarchy of thermal processes collapses under catalysis
• Complete Characterization of Entanglement Embezzlement
• Catalytic transformations for thermal operations
• Second Law of Entanglement Manipulation with Entanglement Battery
• Catalytic enhancement in the performance of the microscopic two-stroke heat engine
• Quantum resource-theoretical analysis of the role of vibrational structure in photoisomerization
• Thermal operations from informational equilibrium
• Finite-size catalysis in quantum resource theories