Hi all,
today we'll hear from Shishir Khandelwal; see below for title and abstract.
-joe
Title: Heat engines for Rindler observers
Abstract: The Unruh effect has been a popular topic of research in quantum field theory for more than four decades. Recent years have also seen an increasing interest in it from the viewpoint of relativistic quantum information. However, it is largely unexplored in the context of the thermodynamics of quantum systems. Probably one of the first works in this direction was recently published, in which a quantum version of the Otto cycle using an accelerated qubit was proposed, which relies on quantum vacuum fluctuations due to the Unruh effect, instead of actual thermal reservoirs. A framework for heat and work extraction was developed using the Unruh-DeWitt model and perturbation theory to the second order. However, the framework restricts the class of thermal processes that can be studied. We generalise it to include a larger class of thermodynamic processes. Furthermore, we extend the model to one with an arbitrary accelerating n-level quantum system and reproduce a previously known result on the efficiency of a non-relativistic n-level quantum Otto cycle.