Trade-off Between Work and Correlations in Quantum Thermodynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores the complex relationship between work and correlations in quantum thermodynamics, providing new insights into their conversion, fundamental costs, and optimal unitaries, bridging quantum thermodynamics and quantum information.

Contribution

It offers a detailed review and new insights into the work cost of correlations and the existence of optimal unitaries for correlation creation in quantum thermodynamics.

Findings

Correlations can be converted into work under specific conditions.

There are fundamental limits to the work cost of creating correlations.

Existence of unitaries that optimally generate correlations from work.

Abstract

Quantum thermodynamics and quantum information are two frameworks for employing quantum mechanical systems for practical tasks, exploiting genuine quantum features to obtain advantages with respect to classical implementations. While appearing disconnected at first, the main resources of these frameworks, work and correlations, have a complicated yet interesting relationship that we examine here. We review the role of correlations in quantum thermodynamics, with a particular focus on the conversion of work into correlations. We provide new insights into the fundamental work cost of correlations and the existence of optimally correlating unitaries, and discuss relevant open problems.