Abstract
We design a heat engine with multiheat reservoir, an ancillary system, and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related to the second law of thermodynamics and give a limitation on the work gain from the engine by analyzing the entropy change and quantum mutual information change during the process. In addition, remarkably, by the combination of two independent engines and with the help of the entropic uncertainty relation with quantum memory, we find that the total maximum work gained from those two heat engines should be larger than a quantity related to the quantum entanglement between the ancillary state and the quantum memory. This result provides a lower bound for the maximum work extracted, in contrast to the upper bound in the conventional second law of thermodynamics. However, the validity of this inequality depends on whether the maximum work can achieve the upper bound.
- Received 30 January 2017
- Revised 3 September 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.96.042304
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