2017/07/31 by Manabendra Nath Bera, Arnau Riera, Maciej Lewenstein +2 · 62 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Carnot cycle #Conservation of energy #Entropy (arrow of time) #Heat engine #Laws of thermodynamics #Premise #Quantum #Quantum many-body systems #Second law of thermodynamics #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #Von Neumann architecture #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.22331/q-2019-02-14-121
published in Quantum 3, 121 (Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften) · Accepted for publication in Quantum. v3 has 25+1 pages, 9 figures, significantly improved presentation after referees' comments, formatted using quantumarticle.cls; v2 has a new co-author added, a few lemmas are generalized
openalex created_date 2017/07/14 · arxiv created 2018/11/29 · openalex publication_date 2019/02/14 · arxiv updated 2019/02/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Thermodynamics and information have intricate interrelations. Often thermodynamics is considered to be the logical premise to justify that <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"><mml:mtext class="MJX-tex-mathit" mathvariant="italic">information is physical</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:math> - through Landauer's principle -, thereby also linking information and thermodynamics. This approach towards information has been instrumental to understand thermodynamics of logical and physical processes, both in the classical and quantum domain. In the present work, we formulate thermodynamics as an exclusive consequence of information conservation. The framework can be applied to the most general situations, beyond the traditional assumptions in thermodynamics: we allow systems and thermal baths to be quantum, of arbitrary sizes and even possessing inter-system correlations.Here, systems and baths are not treated differently, rather both are considered on an equal footing. This leads us to introduce a ''temperature''-independent formulation of thermodynamics. We rely on the fact that, for a fixed amount of information, measured by the von Neumann entropy, any system can be transformed to a state with the same entropy that possesses minimal energy. This state, known as a <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"><mml:mtext class="MJX-tex-mathit" mathvariant="italic">completely passive</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:math> state, acquires Boltzmann-Gibbs canonical form with an <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"><mml:mtext class="MJX-tex-mathit" mathvariant="italic">intrinsic temperature</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:math>. We introduce the notions of bound and free energy and use them to quantify heat and work, respectively. Guided by the principle of information conservation, we develop universal notions of equilibrium, heat and work, Landauer's principle and universal fundamental laws of thermodynamics. We demonstrate that the maximum efficiency of a quantum engine with a finite bath is in general lower than that of an ideal Carnot engine. We introduce a resource theoretic framework for our <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"><mml:mtext class="MJX-tex-mathit" mathvariant="italic">intrinsic temperature</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:math> based thermodynamics, within which we address the problem of work extraction and state transformations. Finally, the framework is extended to multiple conserved quantities.