Freiburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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FM: Fall Meeting

FM 58: Quantum Information Concepts in Thermodynamics

FM 58.5: Talk

Mittwoch, 25. September 2019, 15:15–15:30, 3042

A truly quantum Szilárd demon — •Konstantin Beyer, Kimmo Luoma, and Walter T. Strunz — TU Dresden, Institut für Theoretische Physik

In a Szilárd engine the demon can extract work from a Gibbs state because she has knowledge about the actual microstate of the work medium. In quantum models of this gedankenexperiment the demon usually performs a quantum measurement on the system to obtain this necessary information.

In our approach we adopt a more global point view and consider a situation where the local Gibbs state arises from an entangled state between the work medium and its environment (eigenstate thermalization hypothesis). In such a bipartite situation a quantum demon who observes the environment can, in principle, exploit these correlations to help another party with the work extraction from the work medium. In particular, the possible work extraction schemes are manifold if the demons knowledge about the state of the system originates from an entangled state

Under suitable scenarios the average work extraction can be higher than what could be explained by any classical statistical model. This can be seen as the violation of a quantum steering task and, therefore, represents a semi-device-dependent test of quantumness. The asymmetry of a steering task reflects the typical partition into system and bath in many settings of quantum thermodynamics.