Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions

Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions

Seminar author:Philipp Strasberg

Event date and time:06/07/2017 02:00:pm

Event location:GIQ - Seminar room

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In this talk I will show how to expand the standard thermodynamic framework of a system coupled to a thermal reservoir by considering a stream of independently prepared units repeatedly put into contact with the system. These units can be in any nonequilibrium state and interact with the system with an arbitrary strength and duration. We will see that this stream constitutes an effective resource of nonequilibrium free energy and identify the conditions under which it behaves as a heat, work or information reservoir. We will also briefly discuss that this setup provides a natural framework to analyze information erasure (“Landauer’s principle”) and feedback controlled systems (“Maxwell’s demon”). Furthermore, in the limit of a short system-unit interaction time, I will demonstrate that this setup can be used to provide a thermodynamically sound interpretation to many effective master equations. As an example we will discuss the micromaser, a commonly used experimental setup in quantum optics.