General quantum resources provide advantages in work extraction tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a class of thermodynamic work extraction tasks that certify general quantum resources, including states and channels, demonstrating non-classical advantages and linking them to entanglement and measurement incompatibility.

Contribution

It presents a new work extraction framework that certifies general quantum resources and applies to entanglement detection and anomalous energy flow in quantum systems.

Findings

Quantum resources enable non-classical work extraction advantages.

Work extraction can certify quantum entanglement in a device-independent manner.

Existence of anomalous energy flow is equivalent to measurement incompatibility.

Abstract

In developing quantum science and technologies, it is essential to demonstrate the so-called quantum advantages, which are performances that can be achieved only with the assistance of quantum resources. Most of the time, different quantum features lead to different advantages. Interestingly, there are certain classes of tasks where quantum advantages are achievable by general quantum resources. This work reports such a class of tasks in thermodynamics -- we provide a work extraction task that certifies general quantum resources of both states and channels, suggesting general quantum effects can provide non-classical advantages in work extraction. We also show that such work extraction tasks can be applied to certify quantum entanglement in a one-sided device-independent way. As an application, we report a novel type of anomalous energy flow -- a type of locally extractable energy that is attributed to the globally distributed entanglement. Finally, we show that the existence of this novel anomalous energy flow is equivalent to measurement incompatibility.