Relative thermalization.
- Del Rio L School of Physics, University of Bristol, BS8 1TL Bristol, United Kingdom.
- Hutter A Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
- Renner R Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
- Wehner S Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 117543 Singapore.
- 2016-09-15
Published in:
- Physical review. E. - 2016
English
Locally thermal quantum systems may contradict traditional thermodynamics: heat can flow from a cold body to a hotter one, if the two are highly entangled. We show that to recover thermodynamic laws, we must use a stronger notion of thermalization: a system S is thermal relative to a reference R if S is both locally thermal and uncorrelated with R. Considering a general quantum reference is particularly relevant for a thermodynamic treatment of nanoscale quantum systems. We derive a technical condition for relative thermalization in terms of conditional entropies. Established results on local thermalization, which implicitly assume a classical reference, follow as special cases.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.022104
- PMID 27627243
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/199634
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