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Updated: Aug 2, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime
1CEA/Saclay, Service de Physique Theorique, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65, 1018 XE Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Yerevan Physics Institute, Alikhanian Brot.
Abstract:
The stationary state of a quantum particle strongly coupled to a quantum thermal bath is known to be non-Gibbsian, due to entanglement with the bath. For harmonic potentials, where the system can be described by effective temperatures, thermodynamic relations are shown to take a generalized Gibbsian form that may violate the Clausius inequality. For the weakly anharmonic case, a Fokker-Planck-type description is constructed. It is shown that then work can be extracted from the bath by cyclic variation of a parameter. These apparent violations of the second law are the consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the bath.
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