Quantum thermodynamics: thermodynamics at the nanoscale

Abstract

A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''. 2) In work extraction from two-temperature setups, the presence of correlations can push the effective efficiency beyond the Carnot bound. 3) In the presence of level crossing, non-slow changes may be more optimal than slow ones.

5 pages. Talk given at Physics of Quantum Electronics (PQE2004), Snowbird, by Th.M. Nieuwenhuizen

References in corpus (1)

• Thermodynamics and small quantum systems

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Minimal Energy Cost for Thermodynamic Information Processing: Measurement and Information Erasure
• The resource theory of informational nonequilibrium in thermodynamics
• Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Feedback Control
• Virtual qubits, virtual temperatures, and the foundations of thermodynamics
• Molecular heat pump
• Work extremum principle: Structure and function of quantum heat engines
• Optimal refrigerator
• The smallest refrigerators can reach maximal efficiency
• Maximally and minimally correlated states attainable within a closed evolving system
• Quantum optomechanical piston engines powered by heat
• Re-examining the self-contained quantum refrigerator in the strong-coupling regime
• Minimal Work Principle and its Limits for Classical Systems
• Explanation of the Gibbs paradox within the framework of quantum thermodynamics
• Quantum thermodynamics with missing reference frames: Decompositions of free energy into non-increasing components
• Quantum heat engines and nonequilibrium temperature
• Enhancing the performance of coupled quantum Otto thermal machines without entanglement and quantum correlations
• Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics and Steady State Density Matrix for Quantum Open Systems
• Expected Behavior of Quantum Thermodynamic Machines with Prior Information
• Enabling the self-contained refrigerator to work beyond its limits by filtering the reservoir
• Inferring the Gibbs state of a small quantum system
• Informative priors and the analogy between quantum and classical heat engines
• Adiabatic processes need not correspond to optimal work
• Thermodynamics of enhanced heat transfer: a model study
• Assessing thermalization and estimating the Hamiltonian with output data only
• Appearance of Gibbs states in quantum-state tomography