Resource theory of quantum states out of thermal equilibrium.

By Fernando G. S. L. Brandão, Michal Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim, Joseph M. Renes, Robert W. Spekkens. Physical Review Letters, 2011

607 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources with which one can prepare previously inaccessible states. The theory of entanglement is perhaps the best-known and most well-understood resource theory in this sense. Here, we return to the basic questions of thermodynamics using the formalism of resource theories developed in quantum information theory and show that the free energy of thermodynamics emerges naturally from the resource theory of energy-preserving transformations. Specifically, the free energy quantifies the amount of useful work which can be extracted from asymptotically many copies of a quantum system when using only reversible energy-preserving transformations and a thermal bath at fixed temperature. The free energy also quantifies the rate at which resource states can be reversibly interconverted asymptotically, provided that a sublinear amount of coherent superposition over energy levels is available, a situation analogous to the sublinear amount of classical communication required for entanglement dilution.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e202a8ebc11f48a9202622c1ebf2a1ab73c9ae0c

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Citations in the corpus

A mathematical theory of resources (2014, neutral): “ources are quantum states that deviate from the Gibbs form for a given temperature and quantum operations that deviate from those that are deterministic or inject thermal noise at a given temperature [13]. Each of these will be discussed in this article. The resource theory of asymmetry provides a f”
The role of quantum coherence in non-equilibrium entropy production (2017, background): “(22) can be written as(42,44) Σ 1⁄4 SðρE jjρ E Þ þ IðρSEÞ; (26)”
The resource theory of informational nonequilibrium in thermodynamics (2013, methodology): “The analogue of the Lorenz curve for an athermal state, that is, the generalization of Lorenz curves to a system with a nontrivial Hamiltonian, has recently been studied in (Horodecki and Oppenheim, 2011) and applied in (Brandão et al., 2013).”
Quantum resource theories (2018, background): “As first introduced by Janzing et al. (2000) and later extended in Brandão et al. (2013) and Horodecki and Oppenheim (2013a), the free operations in the QRT of athermality consist of all physical dynamics that conserve total energy as the system exchanges heat with the bath.”
The role of quantum information in thermodynamics—a topical review (2015, methodology): “The distillation rate is found by use of information-compression tools [85].”
Quantum processes which do not use coherence (2015, background): “[3] Fernando GSL Brandao, Micha l Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim, Joseph M Renes, and Robert W Spekkens,”
Quantum coherence, time-translation symmetry and thermodynamics (2014, background): “Athermality is the property of a state of having a distribution over energy levels that is not thermal [3].”
Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy (2014, background): “Proof: From Theorem 2 applied to the Hamiltonian of equation (28), we get”