Nonthermal Quantum Channels as a Thermodynamical Resource

Miguel Navascués and Luis Pedro García-Pintos
Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 010405 – Published 2 July 2015
PDFHTMLExport Citation

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.

  • Received 19 January 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.010405

© 2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Miguel Navascués1 and Luis Pedro García-Pintos2

  • 1Department of Physics, Bilkent University, Ankara 06800, Turkey
  • 2School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TW, United Kingdom

Article Text (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

Supplemental Material (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

References (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand
Issue

Vol. 115, Iss. 1 — 3 July 2015

Reuse & Permissions
Access Options
Author publication services for translation and copyediting assistance advertisement

Authorization Required


×
×

Images

×

Sign up to receive regular email alerts from Physical Review Letters

Log In

Cancel
×

Search


Article Lookup

Paste a citation or DOI

Enter a citation
×