H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TL, UK.
Département de Physique Théorique, Université de Genève, 1211 Genève, Switzerland.
Nat Commun. 2016 Jul 7;7:12049. doi: 10.1038/ncomms12049.
Recently, there has been much progress in understanding the thermodynamics of quantum systems, even for small individual systems. Most of this work has focused on the standard case where energy is the only conserved quantity. Here we consider a generalization of this work to deal with multiple conserved quantities. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and stored in its own battery. Unlike the standard case, in which the amount of extractable energy is constrained, here there is no limit on how much of any individual conserved quantity can be extracted. However, other conserved quantities must be supplied, and the second law constrains the combination of extractable quantities and the trade-offs between them. We present explicit protocols that allow us to perform arbitrarily good trade-offs and extract arbitrarily good combinations of conserved quantities from individual quantum systems.
最近,人们在理解量子系统的热力学方面取得了很大进展,即使是对于较小的单个系统也是如此。这项工作的大部分都集中在标准情况下,其中能量是唯一守恒的量。在这里,我们考虑将这项工作推广到处理多个守恒量的情况。每个守恒量(重要的是,不必与其他量 commute)都可以被提取出来并存储在自己的电池中。与标准情况不同,在标准情况下,可提取的能量数量受到限制,而在这里,任何单个守恒量都可以无限制地提取。然而,其他守恒量必须被供应,并且第二定律限制了可提取量的组合以及它们之间的权衡。我们提出了明确的协议,允许我们从单个量子系统中进行任意好的权衡,并提取任意好的守恒量组合。