2015/02/28 by Martí Perarnau-Llobet, Karen V. Hovhannisyan, Marcus Huber +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.92.042147
published as Phys. Rev. E 92, 042147 (2015) · 6 pages, 2 figures; published version
arxiv created 2015/11/03 · arxiv updated 2015/11/04
Passive states are defined as those states that do not allow for work extraction in a cyclic (unitary) process. Within the set of passive states, thermal states are the most stable ones: they maximize the entropy for a given energy, and similarly they minimize the energy for a given entropy. Here we find the passive states lying in the other extreme, i.e., those that maximize the energy for a given entropy, which we show also minimize the entropy when the energy is fixed. These extremal properties make these states useful to obtain fundamental bounds for the thermodynamics of finite-dimensional quantum systems, which we show in several scenarios.