Alhambra, ÁM; Masanes, L; Oppenheim, J; Perry, C; (2016) The second law of quantum thermodynamics as an equality. Physical Review X , 6 , Article 041017. 10.1103/PhysRevX.6.041017.

Preview

Text PhysRevX.6.041017.pdf Download (290kB) | Preview

Abstract

We investigate the connection between resent results in quantum thermodynamics and fluctuation relations. We adopt a fully quantum mechanical and information theoretic description of thermodynamics and include a work system whose energy is allowed to fluctuate. We derive a generalisation of Gibbs-stochasticity, a condition found in the approach to thermodynamics inspired by quantum information theory. We show that this generalisation gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a thermodynamical transition to happen in the case of fluctuation work. The condition serves as a parent equation which can be used to derive a number of results. These include writing the second law of thermodynamics as an equality featuring a fine-grained notion of the free energy. We also obtain a generalisation of the Jarzynski fluctuation theorem which holds for arbitrary initial states. We further show that each of these three relations can be seen as the quasi-classical limit of three fully quantum identities. This allows us to consider the free energy as an operator, and allows one to obtain more general and fully quantum fluctuation relations from the information theoretic approach to quantum thermodynamics.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVJSONXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item