The extraction of work from quantum coherence

By Kamil Korzekwa, Matteo Lostaglio, Jonathan Oppenheim, David Jennings. 2015

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The interplay between quantum-mechanical properties, such as coherence, and classical notions, such as energy, is a subtle topic at the forefront of quantum thermodynamics. The traditional Carnot argument limits the conversion of heat to work; here we critically assess the problem of converting coherence to work. Through a careful account of all resources involved in the thermodynamic transformations within a fully quantum-mechanical treatment, we show that there exist thermal machines extracting work from coherence arbitrarily well. Such machines only need to act on individual copies of a state and can be reused. On the other hand, we show that for any thermal machine with finite resources not all the coherence of a state can be extracted as work. However, even bounded thermal machines can be reused infinitely many times in the process of work extraction from coherence.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a04980828191e91a8f35f0e18734fc35a2463348

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Gabriel T. Landi

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions (2016, background): “[82] for a resource theory formulation of the problem.”
The role of quantum coherence in non-equilibrium entropy production (2017, background): “Moreover, it also affects the performance of non-adiabatic work protocols [22–25].”