Steering Heat Engines: A Truly Quantum Maxwell Demon

We address the question of verifying the quantumness of thermal machines. A Szilárd engine is truly quantum if its work output cannot be described by a local hidden state model, i.e., an objective local statistical ensemble. Quantumness in this scenario is revealed by a steering-type inequality whic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2019-12, Vol.123 (25), p.250606-250606, Article 250606
Main Authors: Beyer, Konstantin, Luoma, Kimmo, Strunz, Walter T
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Heat engines
Steering
Thermal environments
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Summary:We address the question of verifying the quantumness of thermal machines. A Szilárd engine is truly quantum if its work output cannot be described by a local hidden state model, i.e., an objective local statistical ensemble. Quantumness in this scenario is revealed by a steering-type inequality which bounds the classically extractable work. A quantum Maxwell demon can violate that inequality by exploiting quantum correlations between the work medium and the thermal environment. While for a classical Szilárd engine an objective description of the medium always exists, any such description can be ruled out by a steering task in a truly quantum case.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.250606