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Thermodynamic Capacity of Quantum Processes

Faist, Philippe and Berta, Mario and Brandão, Fernando (2019) Thermodynamic Capacity of Quantum Processes. Physical Review Letters, 122 (20). Art. No. 200601. ISSN 0031-9007. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.200601. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20190211-152656438

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Abstract

Thermodynamics imposes restrictions on what state transformations are possible. In the macroscopic limit of asymptotically many independent copies of a state—as for instance in the case of an ideal gas—the possible transformations become reversible and are fully characterized by the free energy. In this Letter, we present a thermodynamic resource theory for quantum processes that also becomes reversible in the macroscopic limit, a property that is especially rare for a resource theory of quantum channels. We identify a unique single-letter and additive quantity, the thermodynamic capacity, that characterizes the “thermodynamic value” of a quantum channel, in the sense that the work required to simulate many repetitions of a quantum process employing many repetitions of another quantum process becomes equal to the difference of the respective thermodynamic capacities. On a technical level, we provide asymptotically optimal constructions of universal implementations of quantum processes. A challenging aspect of this construction is the apparent necessity to coherently combine thermal engines that would run in different thermodynamic regimes depending on the input state. Our results have applications in quantum Shannon theory by providing a generalized notion of quantum typical subspaces and by giving an operational interpretation to the entropy difference of a channel.


Item Type:Article
Related URLs:
URLURL TypeDescription
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.200601DOIArticle
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.05610arXivDiscussion Paper
ORCID:
AuthorORCID
Berta, Mario0000-0002-0428-3429
Brandão, Fernando0000-0003-3866-9378
Additional Information:© 2019 American Physical Society. Received 31 August 2018; revised manuscript received 18 March 2019; published 24 May 2019. We thank Álvaro Alhambra, David Ding, Patrick Hayden, Rahul Jain, David Jennings, Martí Perarnau-Llobet, Mark Wilde, and Andreas Winter for discussions. P. F. acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Early PostDoc.Mobility Fellowship No. P2EZP2_165239 hosted by the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech, from the IQIM which is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center (NSF Grant No. PHY-1733907), and from the Department of Energy Award No. DE-SC0018407. F. B. is supported by the NSF.
Group:Institute for Quantum Information and Matter
Funders:
Funding AgencyGrant Number
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)P2EZP2_165239
NSFPHY-1733907
Department of Energy (DOE)DE-SC0018407
Issue or Number:20
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.200601
Record Number:CaltechAUTHORS:20190211-152656438
Persistent URL:https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20190211-152656438
Usage Policy:No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.
ID Code:92840
Collection:CaltechAUTHORS
Deposited By: Bonnie Leung
Deposited On:12 Feb 2019 19:41
Last Modified:16 Nov 2021 03:54

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