Nonthermal Quantum Channels as a Thermodynamical Resource

Date
2015
Authors
Navascués, M.
García-Pintos L.P.
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
Physical Review Letters
Print ISSN
0031-9007
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
American Physical Society
Volume
115
Issue
1
Pages
Language
English
Type
Article
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

Quantum thermodynamics can be understood as a resource theory, whereby thermal states are free and the only allowed operations are unitary transformations commuting with the total Hamiltonian of the system. Previous literature on the subject has just focused on transformations between different state resources, overlooking the fact that quantum operations which do not commute with the total energy also constitute a potentially valuable resource. In this Letter, given a number of nonthermal quantum channels, we study the problem of how to integrate them in a thermal engine so as to distill a maximum amount of work. We find that, in the limit of asymptotically many uses of each channel, the distillable work is an additive function of the considered channels, computable for both finite dimensional quantum operations and bosonic channels. We apply our results to bound the amount of distillable work due to the natural nonthermal processes postulated in the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) collapse model. We find that, although GRW theory predicts the possibility of extracting work from the vacuum at no cost, the power which a collapse engine could, in principle, generate is extremely low. © 2015 American Physical Society. © 2015 American Physical Society.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Engines, Hamiltonians, Quantum entanglement, Quantum theory, Thermodynamics, Additive function, Bosonic channels, Finite dimensional, Non-thermal process, Quantum operations, Quantum thermodynamics, Thermodynamical, Unitary transformations, Communication channels (information theory)
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)