2024/06/17 by Pratik Sathe, Sathe, Pratik, Luis Pedro García-Pintos +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.11974
openalex publication_date 2024/06/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The Heisenberg uncertainty relation, which links the uncertainties of the position and momentum of a particle, has an important footprint on the quantum behavior of a physical system. Analogous to this principle, we propose that thermodynamic currents associated with work, heat, and internal energy satisfy their own uncertainty relations. To formalize this idea, we represent these currents by well-defined Hermitian operators, constructed so that their expectation values match the corresponding average currents. Because these operators generally do not commute, the resulting quantum currents differ fundamentally from their classical counterparts. Using the Robertson-Schrödinger uncertainty relation, we derive various uncertainty relations that link different thermodynamic flows. We further illustrate this approach by applying it to quantum batteries, where we derive an energy-power uncertainty relationship and show how measurements affect the fluctuations.