2014/12/17 by Paul Skrzypczyk, Ralph Silva, Nicolas Brunner · 1 voice · 3 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Algorithm #Computer science #Control theory (sociology) #Electrical engineering #Engineering #Gibbs free energy #Mathematics #Passivity #Physics #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Simple (philosophy) #State (computer science) #Statistical physics #Theoretical physics #Thermodynamics #Work (physics) #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.91.052133
published as Phys. Rev. E 91, 052133 (2015) · 3 pages, no figures. v2: Published version
arxiv published 2014/12/17 · openalex publication_date 2015/05/19 · arxiv created 2015/12/04 · arxiv updated 2015/12/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We give a simple and intuitive proof that the only states which are completely passive, i.e., those states from which work cannot be extracted even with infinitely many copies, are Gibbs states at positive temperatures. The proof makes use of the idea of virtual temperatures, i.e., the association of temperatures to pairs of energy levels (transitions). We show that (1) passive states are those where every transition is at a positive temperature and (2) completely passive states are those where every transition is at the same positive temperature.