Lecturer: Dr. David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky, MIT    
Abstract:

The Holy Grail of quantum thermodynamics is finding aconcrete quantum machine that performs better than classical ones. Some earlysuggestions indicate that quantum resources such as quantum coherences¹or quantum reservoir engineering² provide heat machines with uniquefeatures compared  to their classicalcounterparts.  Nevertheless, once all thepreparation costs³ and non-equilibrium sources⁴ have beenproperly accounted for, quantum and classical heatmachines are essentially thesame. Butphysicists don’t give up easily, so the quest for a quantum heatmachine that is fundamentally different from its classical counterpart stillgoes on.

In this talk, I will show that a basic quantum property -energy quantization - allows quantum heat machines to operate even withincompressible working fluids, which would forbid work extraction for classicalheat machines^5,6.

I will discuss how to experimentally measure this effect byrealizing the same heat machine operating in the classical and in the quantumlimit. This research opens up the possibility for experimentally studying thedifference between classical and quantum systems well beyond the realm of heatmachines.

 

[1] Scully, Marlan O., et al. "Extracting work from a single heatbath via vanishing quantum coherence." Science 299.5608(2003): 862-864.

[2] Roßnagel, Johannes, et al. "Nanoscale heat engine beyond theCarnot limit." Physical review letters 112.3 (2014):030602.

[3] Zubairy, M. Suhail. "The Photo‐Carnot Cycle: The Preparation Energy for AtomicCoherence." AIP Conference Proceedings. Vol. 643. No. 1.American Institute of Physics, 2002.

[4] Alicki, Robert, and David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky. "Non-equilibriumquantum heat machines." New Journal of Physics 17.11(2015): 115012.

[5]Gelbwaser-Klimovsky, David, et al. "Single-atom heatmachines enabled by energy quantization." Physical review letters 120.17(2018): 170601.

[6] Levy, Amikam, and David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky. "Quantumfeatures and signatures of quantum thermal machines." Thermodynamicsin the Quantum Regime. Springer, Cham, 2018. 87-126.