Quantum thermodynamics with local control

Lekscha J, Wilming H, Eisert J, Gallego R (2018)


Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2018

Journal

Book Volume: 97

Article Number: 022142

Journal Issue: 2

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.022142

Abstract

We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body systems. Specifically, we study protocols of work extraction that employ a many-body system as a working medium whose evolution can be driven by tuning the on-site Hamiltonian terms. This provides a restricted set of thermodynamic operations, giving rise to alternative bounds for the performance of engines. Our findings show that those limitations in control render it, in general, impossible to reach Carnot efficiency; in its extreme ramification it can even forbid to reach a finite efficiency or finite work per particle. We focus on the one-dimensional Ising model in the thermodynamic limit as a case study. We show that in the limit of strong interactions the ferromagnetic case becomes useless for work extraction, while the antiferromagnetic case improves its performance with the strength of the couplings, reaching Carnot in the limit of arbitrary strong interactions. Our results provide a promising connection between the study of quantum control and thermodynamics and introduce a more realistic set of physical operations well suited to capture current experimental scenarios.

Involved external institutions

How to cite

APA:

Lekscha, J., Wilming, H., Eisert, J., & Gallego, R. (2018). Quantum thermodynamics with local control. Physical Review E, 97(2). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.97.022142

MLA:

Lekscha, Jaqueline, et al. "Quantum thermodynamics with local control." Physical Review E 97.2 (2018).

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