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arXiv:2308.03537

Work extractability from energy eigenstates under optimized local operations

S. Baba, Nobuyuki Yoshioka, Takahiro Sagawa

Published Aug 7, 2023• 0 citations
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Abstract

We examine the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the energy eigenstates of quantum many-body systems that undergo cyclic unitary evolution. Using a numerically optimized control protocol, we analyze how the work extractability is affected by the integrability of the system. Our findings reveal that, in nonintegrable systems the number of work-extractable energy eigenstates converges to zero, even when the local control operations are optimized. In contrast, in integrable systems, there are exponentially many eigenstates from which positive work can be extracted, regardless of the locality of the control operations. We numerically demonstrate that such a strikingly different behavior can be attributed to the number of athermal energy eigenstates. Our results provide insights into the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems, which are expected to contribute to the development of quantum many-body heat engines.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2308.03537

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We examine the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the energy eigenstates of quantum many-body systems that undergo cyclic unitary evolution. Using a numerically optimized control protocol, we analyze how the work extractability is affected by the integrability of the system. Our findings reveal that, in nonintegrable systems the number of work-extractable energy eigenstates converges to zero, even when the local control operations are optimized. In contrast, in integrable systems, there are exponentially many eigenstates from which positive work can be extracted, regardless of the locality of the control operations. We numerically demonstrate that such a strikingly different behavior can be attributed to the number of athermal energy eigenstates. Our results provide insights into the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems, which are expected to contribute to the development of quantum many-body heat engines.
Work extraction from the Gibbs ensemble by a cyclic operation is impossible, as represented by the second law of thermodynamics. On the other hand, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) states that just a single energy eigenstate can describe a thermal equilibrium state. Here, we attempt to unify these two perspectives and investigate the second law at the level of individual energy eigenstates, by examining the possibility of extracting work from a single energy eigenstate. Specifically, we performed numerical exact diagonalization of a quench protocol of local Hamiltonians and evaluated the number of work-extractable energy eigenstates. We found that it becomes exactly zero in a finite system size, implying that a positive amount of work cannot be extracted from any energy eigenstate, if one or both of the prequench and the postquench Hamiltonians are nonintegrable. We argue that the mechanism behind this numerical observation is based on the ETH for a nonlocal observable. Our result implies that quantum chaos, characterized by nonintegrability, leads to a stronger version of the second law than the conventional formulation based on the statistical ensembles.
We show that the maximum extractable work (ergotropy) from a quantum many-body system is constrained by "local athermality" of an initial state and "local entropy decrease" brought about by quantum operations. The obtained universal upper bound on ergotropy implies that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis prohibits work extraction from energy eigenstates by means of finite-time unitary operations. This no-go property implies that Planck's principle, a form of the second law of thermodynamics, holds even for pure quantum states. Our result bridges two independently studied concepts of quantum thermodynamics, the second law and thermalization, via "intrasystem" correlations in many-body systems as a resource for work extraction.
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small systems are often disregarded when deriving such bounds, which is specifically important in the context of quantum thermodynamics. Here we study the maximum extractable work with limited control over the working system and its interaction with the heat bath. We derive a general second law when the set of accessible Hamiltonians of the working system is arbitrarily restricted. We then apply our bound to particular scenarios that are important in realistic implementations: limitations on the maximum energy gap and local control over many-body systems. We hence demonstrate in what precise way the lack of control affects the second law. In particular, contrary to the unrestricted case, we show that the optimal work extraction is not achieved by simple thermal contacts. Our results not only generalize the second law to scenarios of practical relevance, but also take first steps in the direction of local thermodynamics.
Constraints on work extraction are fundamental to our operational understanding of the thermodynamics of both classical and quantum systems. In the quantum setting, finite-time control operations typically generate coherence in the instantaneous energy eigenbasis of the dynamical system. Thermodynamic cycles can, in principle, be designed to extract work from this nonequilibrium resource. Here, we isolate and study the quantum coherent component to the work yield in such protocols. Specifically, we identify a coherent contribution to the ergotropy (the maximum amount of unitarily extractable work via cyclical variation of Hamiltonian parameters). We show this by dividing the optimal transformation into an incoherent operation and a coherence extraction cycle. We obtain bounds for both the coherent and incoherent parts of the extractable work and discuss their saturation in specific settings. Our results are illustrated with several examples, including finite-dimensional systems and bosonic Gaussian states that describe recent experiments on quantum heat engines with a quantized load.
Thermodynamics is operational in the sense that the very concept of thermal equilibrium depends crucially on the choice of observables, while the amount of extractable work is defined relative to the allowed operations. Here we show that isolated quantum many-body states admit a thermodynamic hierarchical structure of observables and allowed operations, where the same state can be thermal at one level of the hierarchy and athermal at another. Enlarging the set of allowed operations therefore renders such hidden athermality a potential resource for work extraction; the resulting work gain is bounded in terms of the difference between the entropy densities of the two levels. This entropy difference takes the form of the mutual-information density. We establish the bounds for three extensions of operational access: increased spatial resolution, increased duration of control, and nonlocal connectivity, which provide access to position-state Holevo information, correlations between neighboring regions and spatially nonlocal correlations, respectively. Thus the difference between entropies at different levels of the thermodynamic hierarchy governs the bound on the work gain associated with moving to a less restricted level.
How we identify heat and work is a fundamental question in modern quantum thermodynamics. Usually, heat and work are attributed to changes in the density matrix and the Hamiltonian, respectively, during time-evolution processes in quantum systems. Recently, it has been recognized that this identification is ambiguous. Furthermore, quantum thermodynamics involving quantum measurement is still under development. Motivated by these on-going works, we consider a quantum many-body system from which we extract energy by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) according to the quantum energy teleportation (QET) protocol. The central idea to define heat and work unambiguously is based on a sharp insight into the optimization condition of LOCC. When LOCC is optimized, the extractable energy by QET becomes a daemonic ergotropy; thus, it can be attributed as work. On the other hand, when LOCC is not optimized, we have not squeezed out all the energy with the unitary operation. It means there is uncontrollable energy left in the system. The uncontrollable energy can be attributed as heat after careful treatment of many-body interactions. The heat term consists of nonlocal correlation due to communication between remote participants, and the correlation cannot be directly observed for the participant in the subsystem. Thus, this feature is consistent with the traditional perspective of heat as an uncontrollable energy. To deeply understand the nature of heat, we derive two types of generalized Clausius inequality in our effective quantum thermodynamics, and discuss the direction of the inequality. To justify our perspective, we examine a one-dimensional Kitaev-like model and discuss the physical meaning of effective temperature in our thermodynamics.