Li Lu, Man Zhong-Xiao, Xia Yun-Jie
Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Laser Polarization and Information Technology, Department of Physics, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China.
Entropy (Basel). 2022 May 3;24(5):644. doi: 10.3390/e24050644.
We study the steady-state thermodynamics of a cascaded collision model where two subsystems S1 and S2 collide successively with an environment in the cascaded fashion. We first formulate general expressions of thermodynamics quantities and identify the nonlocal forms of work and heat that result from cascaded interactions of the system with the common environment. Focusing on a concrete system of two qubits, we then show that, to be able to unidirectionally influence the thermodynamics of S2, the former interaction of S1-R should not be energy conserving. We finally demonstrate that the steady-state coherence generated in the cascaded model is a kind of useful resource in extracting work, quantified by ergotropy, from the system. Our results provide a comprehensive understanding on the thermodynamics of the cascaded model and a possible way to achieve the unidirectional control on the thermodynamics process in the steady-state regime.
我们研究了一个级联碰撞模型的稳态热力学，其中两个子系统S1和S2以级联方式先后与一个环境发生碰撞。我们首先给出了热力学量的一般表达式，并确定了由于系统与共同环境的级联相互作用而产生的非局部形式的功和热。专注于一个由两个量子比特组成的具体系统，我们接着表明，为了能够单向影响S2的热力学，S1-R之间的前一次相互作用不应是能量守恒的。我们最终证明，在级联模型中产生的稳态相干性是从系统中提取由能质亏损量化的功的一种有用资源。我们的结果提供了对级联模型热力学的全面理解，以及在稳态区域实现对热力学过程单向控制的一种可能方法。
