Phys.org April 4, 2023
Nernst’s unattainability principle states that infinite resources are required to cool a system to absolute zero temperature. An international team of researchers (Japan, Austria, Sweden, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, Brazil, Germany) provided a framework for identifying the resources that enable the creation of pure quantum states. They showed that perfect cooling is possible with Landauer energy cost given infinite time or control complexity. However, optimal protocols required complex unitaries generated by an external work source. Restricting to unitaries that can be run solely via a heat engine, they derived a novel Carnot-Landauer limit, along with protocols for its saturation. This generalizes Landauer’s principle to a fully thermodynamic setting leading to a unification with the third law and emphasizes the importance of control in quantum thermodynamics… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Framework. We consider the task of cooling a quantum system in two extremal control scenarios… Credit: PRX Quantum 4, 010332, 27 March 2023