Leopold Infeld Colloquium

Recently, tools of quantum information have been applied to thermodynamics. The new approach allows to meaningfully define thermodynamics of microscopic systems out of equilibrium allowed to interact with a heat bath as well as to define ultimate, model independent limitations for thermodynamical processing.

Thermodynamics in such micro-regime becomes a resource theory, where the main question is whether a given state can be transformed into another state by means of some class of operations. The latter called Thermal Operations consists of arbitrary unitary operations that commute with the total bath-system Hamiltonian.

We will show, how the standard free energy splits in micro-system into at least two different free energies - one denoting the work needed to create a given state, and the other one - being the work that can be later recovered from the system.
We will also report on some recent advances, including thermodynamical processing of coherences.

The talk will be mostly based on the following articles:

Fundamental limitations for quantum and nanoscale thermodynamics, M. Horodecki & J. Oppenheim, http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3834
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130626/ncomms3059/full/ncomms3059.html

The second laws of quantum thermodynamics Fernando Brandão, Michał Horodecki, Nelly Ng, Jonathan Oppenheim and Stephanie Wehner, http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.5278
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3275.abstract

Towards fully quantum second laws of thermodynamics: limitations on the evolution of quantum coherences, Piotr Ćwikliński, Michał Studziński, Michał Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5029