Energetic instability of passive states in thermodynamics

Abstract

Passivity is a fundamental concept in thermodynamics that demands a quantum system’s energy cannot be lowered by any reversible, unitary process acting on the system. In the limit of many such systems, passivity leads in turn to the concept of complete passivity, thermal states and the emergence of a thermodynamic temperature. Here we only consider a single system and show that every passive state except the thermal state is unstable under a weaker form of reversibility. Indeed, we show that given a single copy of any athermal quantum state, an optimal amount of energy can be extracted from it when we utilise a machine that operates in a reversible cycle. This means that for individual systems, the only form of passivity that is stable under general reversible processes is complete passivity, and thus provides a physically motivated identification of thermal states when we are not operating in the thermodynamic limit.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Sparaciari, C Jennings, D Oppenheim, J
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2017. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 22 September 2017 Published: 1 December 2017
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Theoretical Physics (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	30 Nov 2018 13:49
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2018 13:49
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-017-01505-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:139387

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Energetic instability of passive states in thermodynamics

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