In the last two decades, important advances have been made in our understanding of how systems at the microscale and nanoscale exchange energy with the environment that they are inevitably embedded in. At the forefront of these advances has been the development of a suite of fluctuation relations [1,2] that provide precise relationships between thermodynamic quantities, such as work and free-energy. Importantly, these relations have refined our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics and irreversibility; and they have yielded new techniques for extracting equilibrium information from systems driven far from equilibrium. However, while these new relations have been tested and utilized with great success in a wide range of classical systems [3,4], their experimental verification in quantum systems remains an outstanding challenge. Moreover, there remain questions about how actually to characterize and measure quantities like work for open quantum systems. In this talk, it will be addressed the key points concerning those fluctuation relations and highlight their implications to the quantum “technology” and information.
[1] Christopher Jarzynski. Equalities and Inequalities: Irreversibility and the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the Nanoscale. Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys. 2, 329 (2011).
[2] Michele Campisi et al.. Colloquium: Quantum fluctuation relations: Foundations and applications. Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 771 (2011).
[3] Shoichi Toyabe et al..Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality. Nature Phys. 6, 988 (2010).
[4] O. -P. Saira et al.. Test of the Jarzynski and Crooks Fluctuation Relations in an Electronic System. Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 180601 (2012)
