Can Thermodynamic Behavior of Alice's Particle Affect Bob's Particle?

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experiment to explore how entanglement influences thermodynamic behavior between distant particles, revealing that quantum correlations affect heat transfer and energy exchange in entangled systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental framework to study long-distance thermodynamic effects in entangled particles, highlighting the impact of quantum correlations on heat transfer.

Findings

Heat transfer depends on the thermalization of the distant particle.

Quantum correlations influence thermodynamic behavior of entangled particles.

Thermodynamic processes are interconnected through entanglement.

Abstract

We propose an experiment to investigate the possibility of long-distance thermodynamic relationships between two entangled particles. We consider a pair of spin 1/2 particles prepared in an entangled singlet state in which one particle is sent to Alice and the other to her distant mate Bob, who are spatially separated. Our proposed experiment consists of three different setups: First, both particles are coupled to two heat baths with various temperatures. In the second setup, only Alice's particle is coupled to a heat bath and finally, in the last setup, only Bob's particle is coupled to a heat bath. We study the evolution of an open quantum system using the first law of thermodynamics based on the concepts of ergotropy, adiabatic work, and operational heat, in a quantum fashion. We analyze and compare ergotropy and heat transfer in three setups. Our results show that the heat transfer for each entangled particle is not independent of the thermalization process that occurs for the other one. We prove that the existence of quantum correlations affects the thermodynamic behavior of distant particles in an entangled state.