Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy

By Matteo Lostaglio, David Jennings, Terry Rudolph. Nature Communications, 2014

689 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent studies have developed fundamental limitations on nanoscale thermodynamics, in terms of a set of independent free energy relations. Here we show that free energy relations cannot properly describe quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes. By casting time-asymmetry as a quantifiable, fundamental resource of a quantum state, we arrive at an additional, independent set of thermodynamic constraints that naturally extend the existing ones. These asymmetry relations reveal that the traditional Szilárd engine argument does not extend automatically to quantum coherences, but instead only relational coherences in a multipartite scenario can contribute to thermodynamic work. We find that coherence transformations are always irreversible. Our results also reveal additional structural parallels between thermodynamics and the theory of entanglement. The statistical nature of standard thermodynamics provides an incomplete picture for individual processes at the nanoscale, and new relations have been developed to extend it. Here, the authors show that by quantifying time-asymmetry it is also possible to characterize how quantum coherence is modified in such processes.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/188990a06880551210d9f422225f271d6e820a17

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum coherence, time-translation symmetry and thermodynamics (2014, background): “However coherence can be viewed as a second, independent resource in thermodynamics [13].”
Coherence effects in the performance of the quantum Otto heat engine (2018, background): “The divergence D ( ρ||ρref ) can be shown to be decomposed as [56, 57, 70, 71]”
The role of quantum coherence in non-equilibrium entropy production (2017, background): “[17] Lostaglio, M.”
Irreversible entropy production: From classical to quantum (2020, background): “(Lostaglio et al., 2015a) the authors have proven the following stronger result: Theorem 4 The set of thermal operations on a quantum system is a subset of the set of time-translation invariant operations.”
Quantum processes which do not use coherence (2015, background): “[14] Matteo Lostaglio, David Jennings, and Terry Rudolph, “Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy,” Nature communications 6 (2015).”
Quantum resource theories (2018, background): “(27) (with the system S̃ being discarded), it can be seen that every thermal operation is time-translation covariant, i.e. [Φ,Ut] = 0 for all t (Lostaglio et al., 2015a).”
Extracting work from correlations (2014, background): “[6] M.”