The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit-when the number of particles becomes very large. Here we study thermodynamics in the opposite ...regime-at both the nanoscale and when quantum effects become important. Applying results from quantum information theory, we construct a theory of thermodynamics in these limits. We derive general criteria for thermodynamical state transitions, and, as special cases, find two free energies: one that quantifies the deterministically extractable work from a small system in contact with a heat bath, and the other that quantifies the reverse process. We find that there are fundamental limitations on work extraction from non-equilibrium states, owing to finite size effects and quantum coherences. This implies that thermodynamical transitions are generically irreversible at this scale. As one application of these methods, we analyse the efficiency of small heat engines and find that they are irreversible during the adiabatic stages of the cycle.
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and ...it says that a system can only evolve into another if the free energy goes down. Recently, it's been shown that there are actually many second laws, and that it is only for large macroscopic systems that they all become equivalent to the ordinary one. These additional second laws also hold for quantum systems, and are, in fact, often more relevant in this regime. They place a restriction on how the probabilities of energy levels can evolve. Here, we consider additional restrictions on how the coherences between energy levels can evolve. Coherences can only go down, and we provide a set of restrictions which limit the extent to which they can be maintained. We find that coherences over energy levels must decay at rates that are suitably adapted to the transition rates between energy levels. We show that the limitations are matched in the case of a single qubit, in which case we obtain the full characterization of state-to-state transformations. For higher dimensions, we conjecture that more severe constraints exist. We also introduce a new class of thermodynamical operations which allow for greater manipulation of coherences and study its power with respect to a class of operations known as thermal operations.
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second laws of quantum thermodynamics Brandão, Fernando; Horodecki, Michał; Ng, Nelly ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
03/2015, Volume:
112, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Significance In ordinary thermodynamics, transitions are governed by a single quantity–the free energy. Its monotonicity is a formulation of the second law. Here, we find that the second law for ...microscopic or highly correlated systems takes on a very different form than it does at the macroscopic scale, imposing not just one constraint on state transformations, but many. We find a family of quantum free energies which generalize the standard free energy, and can never increase. The ordinary second law corresponds to the nonincreasing of one of these free energies, with the remainder imposing additional constraints on thermodynamic transitions. In the thermodynamic limit, these additional second laws become equivalent to the standard one. We also prove a strengthened version of the zeroth law of thermodynamics, allowing a definition of temperature.
The second law of thermodynamics places constraints on state transformations. It applies to systems composed of many particles, however, we are seeing that one can formulate laws of thermodynamics when only a small number of particles are interacting with a heat bath. Is there a second law of thermodynamics in this regime? Here, we find that for processes which are approximately cyclic, the second law for microscopic systems takes on a different form compared to the macroscopic scale, imposing not just one constraint on state transformations, but an entire family of constraints. We find a family of free energies which generalize the traditional one, and show that they can never increase. The ordinary second law relates to one of these, with the remainder imposing additional constraints on thermodynamic transitions. We find three regimes which determine which family of second laws govern state transitions, depending on how cyclic the process is. In one regime one can cause an apparent violation of the usual second law, through a process of embezzling work from a large system which remains arbitrarily close to its original state. These second laws are relevant for small systems, and also apply to individual macroscopic systems interacting via long-range interactions. By making precise the definition of thermal operations, the laws of thermodynamics are unified in this framework, with the first law defining the class of operations, the zeroth law emerging as an equivalence relation between thermal states, and the remaining laws being monotonicity of our generalized free energies.
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Consider two parties: Alice and Bob and suppose that Bob is given a qubit system in a quantum state
ϕ
, unknown to him. Alice knows
ϕ
and she is supposed to convince Bob that she knows
ϕ
sending some ...test message. Is it possible for her to convince Bob providing him "zero knowledge" i. e. no information about
ϕ
he has? We prove that there is no "zero knowledge" protocol of that kind. In fact it turns out that basing on Alice message, Bob (or third party - Eve - who can intercept the message) can synthetize a copy of the unknown qubit state
ϕ
with nonzero probability. This "no-go" result puts general constrains on information processing where information about quantum state is involved.
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.
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Port-based teleportation (PBT), introduced in 2008, is a type of quantum teleportation protocol which transmits the state to the receiver without requiring any corrections on the receiver's side. ...Evaluating the performance of PBT was computationally intractable and previous attempts succeeded only with small systems. We study PBT protocols and fully characterize their performance for arbitrary dimensions and number of ports. We develop new mathematical tools to study the symmetries of the measurement operators that arise in these protocols and belong to the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators. First, we develop the representation theory of the mentioned algebra which provides an elegant way of understanding the properties of subsystems of a large system with general symmetries. In particular, we introduce the theory of the partially reduced irreducible representations which we use to obtain a simpler representation of the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators and thus explicitly determine the properties of any port-based teleportation scheme for fixed dimension in polynomial time.
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We present an example of a thermal process (TP) for a system of d energy levels, which cannot be performed without an instant access to the whole energy space. This TP is uniquely connected with a ...transition between some states of the system, that cannot be performed without access to the whole energy space even when approximate transitions are allowed. Pursuing the question about the decomposability of TPs into convex combinations of compositions of processes acting non-trivially on smaller subspaces, we investigate transitions within the subspace of states diagonal in the energy basis. For three level systems, we determine the set of extremal points of these operations, as well as the minimal set of operations needed to perform an arbitrary TP, and connect the set of TPs with thermomajorization criterion. We show that the structure of the set depends on temperature, which is associated with the fact that TPs cannot increase deterministically extractable work from a state-the conclusion that holds for arbitrary d level system. We also connect the decomposability problem with detailed balance symmetry of an extremal TPs.
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