Universal formulae yield driving-field spatiotemporal profiles that minimize multipartite decoherence and disentanglement in thermal environments. They also allow entropy- and heat-flow control on non-Markovian time scales.
Quantum thermodynamics has emerged as a central field for understanding how energy conversion processes occur in microscopic systems. In these systems, effects such as coherence, entanglement, and non-Markovianity play key roles. In this thesis, we explore different ways to describe quantum thermodynamics, using two main approaches: one based on entropy and the other on ergotropy. First, we introduce a generalized approach to quantify non-Markovianity through the breakdown of monotonicity in thermodynamic functions. In this context, the entropy-based heat flow serves as a practical tool to witness and measure quantum memory in unital maps that do not reverse the sign of the internal energy. Next, we analyze the dynamics of ergotropy in open qubits under both Markovian and non-Markovian evolutions. We identify phenomena such as freezing and sudden death of ergotropy, and we establish an analytical relation between the change in ergotropy and the environment-induced work . This provides a clear physical interpretation for the additional term in the first law in the entropy-based formulation. Finally, we propose an ergotropy-based thermodynamic formulation, in which heat is reinterpreted in terms of the change of the passive state associated with the density operator governing the quantum dynamics. This approach allows one to measure non-Markovianity of unital maps more generally and accurately than the entropy-based heat flow. This advantage comes from the direct link between heat and von Neumann entropy, a property ensured by invariance under passive transformations. Moreover, the out-of-equilibrium temperature naturally remains non-negative, similarly to equilibrium thermodynamics.
Entanglement is very susceptible to decoherence and can rapidly decay or even completely disappear in finite time. A universal dynamical control of the disentanglement approach is presented, whereby one locally modulates entangled systems weakly coupled to thermal baths. We show that these local modulations can reduce the entanglement's decay rate and may facilitate controlled oscillations of entanglement that result in entanglement partial resuscitation. In the case of separate systems, we show that controlling the asymmetry between the systems' decoherence rates may result in partial resuscitation in non-Markovian time scales. Furthermore, controlling the time-dependent cross-decoherence of systems coupled to the same bath may exhibit partial resuscitation on longer time scales, dictated by the local modulations.