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 […]
Tag Archives: Quantum thermodynamics
The quantum refrigerator
Science Daily July 29, 2021 An international team of researchers (Germany, Austria, Portugal, Singapore) has provided a detailed proposal of how to realize a quantum machine in one-dimensional ultracold atomic gases, which consists of a set of modular operations giving rise to a piston. These can then be coupled sequentially to thermal baths, with the innovation that a quantum field takes up the role of the working fluid. They proposed models for compression on the system to use it as a piston and coupling to a bath that gives rise to a valve controlling heat flow. By composing the numerically […]