Dynamics of ergotropy and environment-induced work

Entanglement entropy is one of the most prominent measures in quantum physics. We show that it has an interesting ergotropic interpretation in terms of unitarily extracted work. It determines how much energy one can extract from a source of pure unknown states by applying unitary operations when only local measurements can be performed to characterize this source. Additionally, entanglement entropy sets a limit on the minimal temperature to which these partially characterized...

Energy extraction is a central task in thermodynamics. In quantum physics, ergotropy measures the amount of work extractable under cyclic Hamiltonian control. As its full extraction requires perfect knowledge of the initial state, however, it does not characterize the work value of unknown or untrusted quantum sources. Fully characterizing such sources would require quantum tomography, which is prohibitively costly in experiments due to the exponential growth of required meas...

We establish a connection between non-Markovian memory effects and thermodynamical quantities such as work. We show how memory effects can be interpreted as revivals of work that can be extracted from a quantum system. We prove that non-Markovianity may allow an increase in the extractable work even when the entropy of the system is increasing. Our results have important implications both in quantum thermodynamics and in quantum information theory. In the former context they ...

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in quantum thermodynamic devices, notably quantum batteries. Quantum batteries serve as energy storage devices governed by the rules of quantum thermodynamics. Here, we propose a model of a quantum battery wherein the system of interest can be envisaged as a battery, and the ambient environment acts as a charger (dissipation) mechanism, modeled along the ubiquitous quantum Brownian motion. We employ quantifiers like ergotropy an...

The paradigm of extracting work from isolated quantum system through a cyclic Hamiltonian process is a topic of immense research interest. The optimal work extracted under such process is termed as ergotropy [Europhys. Lett., 67 (4), 565(2004)]. Here, in a multi-party scenario we consider only a class of such cyclic processes that can be implemented locally, giving rise to the concept of local ergotropy. Eventually, presence of quantum correlations result in a non-vanishing t...

A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''. 2) In work extraction from two-temperature setups, the presence of correlations can push the effective efficiency beyond the Carnot bound. 3) In the presence of level crossing, non-slow changes may be more optimal than slow ones.

The thermodynamics of quantum systems driven out of equilibrium has attracted increasing attention in last the decade, in connection with quantum information and statistical physics, and with a focus on non-classical signatures. While a first approach can deal with average thermodynamics quantities over ensembles, in order to establish the impact of quantum and environmental fluctuations during the evolution, a continuous quantum measurement of the open system is required. He...

The amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum system can be increased by exploiting the information obtained from a measurement performed on a correlated ancillary system. The concept of daemonic ergotropy has been introduced to properly describe and quantify this work extraction enhancement in the quantum regime. We here explore the application of this idea in the context of continuously-monitored open quantum systems, where information is gained by measuring the e...

We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open system states, and on a principle of minimal dissipation. This principle leads to a unique prescription for the decomposition of the master equation into a Hamiltonian part representing coherent time evolution and a dissipator part describing d...

We consider a quasi-probability distribution of work for an isolated quantum system coupled to the energy-storage device given by the ideal weight. Specifically, we analyze a trade-off between changes in average energy and changes in weight's variance, where work is extracted from the coherent and incoherent ergotropy of the system. Primarily, we reveal that the extraction of positive coherent ergotropy can be accompanied by the reduction of work fluctuations (quantified by a...