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Quantifying Non-locality through Heat Engines and Distributed Negentropy

Jonathan Oppenheim, Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Ryszard Horodecki

Published Dec 12, 2001• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state $\\rho$ shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. For pure states and maximally correlated states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. In these cases a form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum non-locality.

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We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho\\rhorho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. For pure states and maximally correlated states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. In these cases a form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum non-locality.
We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. A form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum nonlocality.
Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an important quantum information processing paradigm in which two parties sharing many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states by means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a thermodynamical point of view since they allow thermal energy to be converted into work by local quantum heat engines. The work deficit was defined as the decrease in the work extractable from the joint system due to this process of localization, and was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. We give a simple information theoretical characterization of the one-way work deficit, which turns out to be complementary to a previously known operational measure of classical correlations, the one-way distillable common randomness
We study the process of assisted work distillation. This scenario arises when two parties share a bipartite quantum state ρ_{AB} and their task is to locally distill the optimal amount of work when one party is restricted to thermal operations, whereas the other can perform general quantum operations and they are allowed to communicate classically. We demonstrate that this question is intimately related to the distillation of classical and quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the advantage of one party performing global measurements over many copies of ρ_{AB} is related to the nonadditivity of the entanglement of formation. We also show that there may exist work bound in the quantum correlations of the state that is only extractable under the wider class of local Gibbs-preserving operations.
In spite of many results in quantum information theory, the complex nature of compound systems is far from clear. In general the information is a mixture of local and nonlocal (``quantum'') information. It is important from both pragmatic and theoretical points of view to know the relationships between the two components. To make this point more clear, we develop and investigate the quantum-information processing paradigm in which parties sharing a multipartite state distill local information. The amount of information which is lost because the parties must use a classical communication channel is the deficit. This scheme can be viewed as complementary to the notion of distilling entanglement. After reviewing the paradigm in detail, we show that the upper bound for the deficit is given by the relative entropy distance to so-called pseudoclassically correlated states; the lower bound is the relative entropy of entanglement. This implies, in particular, that any entangled state is informationally nonlocal---i.e., has nonzero deficit. We also apply the paradigm to defining the thermodynamical cost of erasing entanglement. We show the cost is bounded from below by relative entropy of entanglement. We demonstrate the existence of several other nonlocal phenomena which can be found using the paradigm of local information. For example, we prove the existence of a form of nonlocality without entanglement and with distinguishability. We analyze the deficit for several classes of multipartite pure states and obtain that in contrast to the GHZ state, the Aharonov state is extremely nonlocal. We also show that there do not exist states for which the deficit is strictly equal to the whole informational content (bound local information). We discuss the relation of the paradigm with measures of classical correlations introduced earlier. It is also proved that in the one-way scenario, the deficit is additive for Bell diagonal states. We then discuss complementary features of information in distributed quantum systems. Finally we discuss the physical and theoretical meaning of the results and pose many open questions.
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the battery, after a work extraction protocol. The quality of energy extracted is usually argued to be good by quantifying higher moments of the energy distribution, or by restricting the amount of entropy to be low. This limits the amount of heat contribution to the energy extracted, but does not completely prevent it. We show that the definition of 'work' is crucial. If one allows for a definition of work that tolerates a non-negligible entropy increase in the battery, then a small scale heat engine can possibly exceed the Carnot efficiency. This can be done without using any additional resources such as coherence or correlations, and furthermore can be achieved even when one of the heat baths is finite in size.