Abstract
The main thread that links classical thermodynamics and the thermodynamics of small quantum systems is the celebrated Clausius inequality form of the second law. However, its application to small quantum systems suffers from two cardinal problems. (i) The Clausius inequality does not hold when the system and environment are initially correlated - a commonly encountered scenario in microscopic setups. (ii) In some other cases, the Clausius inequality does not provide any useful information (e.g., in dephasing scenarios). We address these deficiencies by developing the notion of global passivity and employing it as a tool for deriving thermodynamic inequalities on observables. For initially uncorrelated thermal environments the global passivity framework recovers the Clausius inequality. More generally, global passivity provides an extension of the Clausius inequality that holds even in the presences of strong initial system-environment correlations. Crucially, the present framework provides additional thermodynamic bounds on expectation values. To illustrate the role of the additional bounds, we use them to detect unaccounted heat leaks and weak feedback operations ("Maxwell demons") that the Clausius inequality cannot detect. In addition, it is shown that global passivity can put practical upper and lower bounds on the buildup of system-environment correlations for dephasing interactions. Our findings are highly relevant for experiments in various systems such as ion traps, superconducting circuits, atoms in optical cavities, and more.
Original language | American English |
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Article number | 021064 |
Journal | Physical Review X |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 12 Jun 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant No. 2014405), by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1526/15), and by the Henri Gutwirth Fund for the Promotion of Research at the Technion. We thank Professor C. Jarzynski for pointing out the relation between the ICCI in the couple thermal state, and a recent classical result for a similar scenario .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.