Thermal Relational Quantum Thermodynamics

F.G.A. van den Berg

PREDICTIONS

pJ Berakdarp

S. Shahidani, A. T. Rezakhani

In this article, we present a brief and elementary review of quantum thermodynamics and its achievements and challenges. This review includes an introduction to some fundamental concepts such as internal energy, heat, work, entropy, entropy production, thermal equilibrium, second law of quantum thermodynamics, relation between thermodynamics and information theory, as well as a discussion of how quantum effects such as entanglement and correlations affect performance of quantum heat engines.

Sebastian Deffner, Steve Campbell

S. Shahidani, A. T. Rezakhani

In this article, we present a brief and elementary review of quantum thermodynamics and its achievements and challenges. This review includes an introduction to some fundamental concepts such as internal energy, heat, work, entropy, entropy production, thermal equilibrium, second law of quantum thermodynamics, relation between thermodynamics and information theory, as well as a discussion of how quantum effects such as entanglement and correlations affect performance of quantum heat engines.

Lídia del Rio, Adrian Hutter, Renato Renner +1 more

Locally thermal quantum systems may contradict traditional thermodynamics: heat can flow from a cold body to a hotter one, if the two are highly entangled. We show that to recover thermodynamic laws, we must use a stronger notion of thermalization: a system S is thermal relative to a reference R if S is both locally thermal and uncorrelated with R. Considering a general quantum reference is particularly relevant for a thermodynamic treatment of nanoscale quantum systems. We derive a technical condition for relative thermalization in terms of conditional entropies. Established results on local thermalization, which implicitly assume a classical reference, follow as special cases.