Thermodynamics of quantum systems with multiple conserved quantities.

Nat Commun

H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TL, UK.

Published: July 2016

Recently, there has been much progress in understanding the thermodynamics of quantum systems, even for small individual systems. Most of this work has focused on the standard case where energy is the only conserved quantity. Here we consider a generalization of this work to deal with multiple conserved quantities. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and stored in its own battery. Unlike the standard case, in which the amount of extractable energy is constrained, here there is no limit on how much of any individual conserved quantity can be extracted. However, other conserved quantities must be supplied, and the second law constrains the combination of extractable quantities and the trade-offs between them. We present explicit protocols that allow us to perform arbitrarily good trade-offs and extract arbitrarily good combinations of conserved quantities from individual quantum systems.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4941046PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12049DOI Listing

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