Thermal operations from informational equilibrium

Abstract

Thermal operations are quantum channels that have taken a prominent role in deriving fundamental thermodynamic limitations in quantum systems. We show that these channels are uniquely characterized by a purely quantum information theoretic property: They admit a dilation into a unitary process that leaves the environment invariant when applied to the equilibrium state. In other words, they are the only channels that preserve equilibrium between system and environment. Extending this perspective, we explore an information theoretic idealization of heat bath behavior, by considering channels where the environment remains locally invariant for every initial state of the system. These are known as catalytic channels. We show that catalytic channels provide a refined hierarchy of Gibbs-preserving maps for fully-degenerate Hamiltonians, and are closely related to dual unitary quantum circuits.

5+7 pages; comments welcome

References in corpus (36)

• Quantum Resource Theories
• Fundamental limitations for quantum and nano thermodynamics
• Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy
• The second laws of quantum thermodynamics
• The Resource Theory of Quantum States Out of Thermal Equilibrium
• Quantum coherence, time-translation symmetry and thermodynamics
• The resource theory of informational nonequilibrium in thermodynamics
• Extending Noether's theorem by quantifying the asymmetry of quantum states
• Towards fully quantum second laws of thermodynamics: limitations on the evolution of quantum coherences
• Exact dynamics in dual-unitary quantum circuits
• An introductory review of the resource theory approach to thermodynamics
• The Minimal Work Cost of Information Processing
• Gibbs-Preserving Maps outperform Thermal Operations in the quantum regime
• Factorization and dilation problems for completely positive maps on von Neumann algebras
• Quantum Lost and Found
• Elementary Thermal Operations
• Limits to catalysis in quantum thermodynamics
• Quantum thermodynamics of correlated-catalytic state conversion at small-scale
• An asymptotic property of factorizable completely positive maps and the Connes embedding problem
• Fundamental work cost of quantum processes
• Catalytic quantum randomness
• Work and reversibility in quantum thermodynamics
• Continuous thermomajorization and a complete set of laws for Markovian thermal processes
• Dynamical maps, quantum detailed balance and Petz recovery map
• Quantum information spreading in generalised dual-unitary circuits
• Correlations in typicality and an affirmative solution to the exact catalytic entropy conjecture
• Resource theory of quantum thermodynamics: Thermal operations and Second Laws
• Exploring the gap between thermal operations and enhanced thermal operations
• Catalysis in Action via Elementary Thermal Operations
• Randomness for quantum channels:Genericity of catalysis and quantum advantage of uniformness
• A hierarchy of thermal processes collapses under catalysis
• Second Law of Entanglement Manipulation with Entanglement Battery
• Gibbs-preserving operations requiring infinite amount of quantum coherence
• Extreme Points and Factorizability for New Classes of Unital Quantum Channels
• Catalytic channels are the only noise-robust catalytic processes
• Delocalized and Dynamical Catalytic Randomness and Information Flow