Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions
By Philipp Strasberg, Gernot Schaller, Tobias Brandes, Massimiliano Esposito. 2016
318 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We expand the standard thermodynamic framework of a system coupled to a thermal reservoir by considering a stream of independently prepared units repeatedly put into contact with the system. These units can be in any nonequilibrium state and interact with the system with an arbitrary strength and duration. We show that this stream constitutes an effective resource of nonequilibrium free energy and identify the conditions under which it behaves as a heat, work or information reservoir. We also show that this setup provides a natural framework to analyze information erasure ("Landauer's principle") and feedback controlled systems ("Maxwell's demon"). In the limit of a short system-unit interaction time, we further demonstrate that this setup can be used to provide a thermodynamically sound interpretation to many effective master equations. We discuss how non-autonomously driven systems, micromasers, lasing without inversion, and the electronic Maxwell demon, can be thermodynamically analyzed within our framework. While the present framework accounts for quantum features (e.g. squeezing, entanglement, coherence), we also show that quantum resources do not offer any advantage compared to classical ones in terms of the maximum extractable work.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf1c887f38d670520d7191e475c255c0f11d4ded
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Experiments in Stochastic Thermodynamics: Short History and Perspectives (2017, background): “The first is the application to quantum systems, which presents several problems discussed in another article [174].”
- The role of quantum coherence in non-equilibrium entropy production (2017, background): “(44) reveals that on the stochastic level, the entropy production ξ due to the loss of coherence is nothing but the change in information between incompatible bases, a quantity sometimes referred to as information gain.”