Hi all,
we're in HIT K51 this week. Martî Perarnau-Llobet is visiting from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich and will give a talk on recent research in quantum thermodynamics. See below for title and abstract.
Best,
-joe
Title: Collective operations can extremely reduce work fluctuations
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss work extraction from N copies of a quantum system. When the same work-extraction protocol is implemented on each copy, the relative size of fluctuations decays as 1/\sqrt{N} due to the law of large numbers. We will instead consider protocols where the copies can be processed collectively, and see that work fluctuations can then disappear exponentially fast in N. As a consequence, a considerable proportion of the average extractable work W can be obtained almost deterministically by globally processing a few copies of the state. This will be shown in two canonical scenarios for work extraction: (I) in thermally isolated systems, where W corresponds to the energy difference between the initial and the passive state, and (ii) in the presence of a thermal bath, where W is given by the free energy difference between the initial and the thermal state.