Heat exchanges are the essence of Thermodynamics. In order to investigate non-equilibrium effects like quantum coherence and correlations in heat flows we introduce the concept of apparent temperature. Its definition is based on the expression of the heat flow between out-of-equilibrium quantum systems. Such apparent temperatures contain crucial information on the role and impact of correlations and coherence in heat exchanges. In particular, both behave as populations, affecting dramatically the population balance and therefore the apparent temperatures and the heat flows. We show how seminal results can be re-obtained, offering an interesting alternative point of view. We also present new predictions and suggest a simple experiment to test them. Our results show how quantum and non-equilibrium effects can be used advantageously, finding applications in quantum thermal machine designs and non-equilibrium thermodynamics but also in collective-effect phenomena.
Both coherence and entanglement stem from the superposition principle, capture quantumness of a physical system, and play a central role in quantum physics. In a multipartite quantum system, coherence and quantum correlations are closely connected. In particular, it has been established that quantum coherence of a bipartite state is an important resource for its conversion to entanglement [A. Streltsov {it et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 115}, 020403 (2015)] and to quantum discord [J. Ma {it et al}., Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 116}, 160407 (2016)]. We show here that there is a very close association between partial coherence introduced by Luo and Sun [S. Luo and Y. Sun, Phys. Rev. A {bf 96}, 022136 (2017)] and quantum correlations (quantified by quantum discord) in both directions. Furthermore, we propose families of coherence measures in terms of quantum correlations and quantum Fisher information.
We examine the connection between the dwell time of a quantum particle in a region of space and flux-flux correlations at the boundaries. It is shown that the first and second moments of a flux-flux correlation function which generalizes a previous proposal by Pollak and Miller [E. Pollak and W. H. Miller, Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 53}, 115 (1984)], agree with the corresponding moments of the dwell-time distribution, whereas the third and higher moments do not. We also discuss operational approaches and approximations to measure the flux-flux correlation function and thus the second moment of the dwell time, which is shown to be characteristically quantum, and larger than the corresponding classical moment even for freely moving particles.
Bells inequalities are defined by sums of correlations involving non-commuting observables in each of the two systems. Violations of Bells inequalities are only possible because the precision of any joint measurement of these observables will be limited by quantum mechanical uncertainty relations. In this paper we explore the relation between the local measurement uncertainties and the magnitude of the correlations by preparing polarization entangled photon pairs and performing joint measurements of non-commuting polarization components at different uncertainty trade-offs. The change in measurement visibility reveals the existence of a non-trivial balance between the measurement uncertainties where the probabilities of a specific pair of measurement outcomes approaches zero because of the particular combination of enhancement and suppression of the experimentally observed correlations. The occurrence of these high-contrast results shows that the quantum correlations between the photons are close to their maximal value, confirming that the Cirelson bound of Bells inequality violations is defined by the minimal uncertainties that limit the precision of joint measurements.
We identify that quantum coherence is a valuable resource in the quantum heat engine, which is designed in a quantum thermodynamic cycle assisted by a quantum Maxwells demon. This demon is in a superposed state. The quantum work and heat are redefined as the sum of coherent and incoherent parts in the energy representation. The total quantum work and the corresponding efficiency of the heat engine can be enhanced due to the coherence consumption of the demon. In addition, we discuss an universal information heat engine driven by quantum coherence. The extractable work of this heat engine is limited by the quantum coherence, even if it has no classical thermodynamic cost. This resource-driven viewpoint provides a direct and effective way to clarify the thermodynamic processes where the coherent superposition of states cannot be ignored.
Open quantum systems exhibit a rich phenomenology, in comparison to closed quantum systems that evolve unitarily according to the Schrodinger equation. The dynamics of an open quantum system are typically classified into Markovian and non-Markovian, depending on whether the dynamics can be decomposed into valid quantum operations at any time scale. Since Markovian evolutions are easier to simulate, compared to non-Markovian dynamics, it is reasonable to assume that non-Markovianity can be employed for useful quantum-technological applications. Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of non-Markovianity for preserving correlations and coherence in quantum systems. For this, we consider a broad class of qubit evolutions, having a decoherence matrix separated from zero for large times. While any such Markovian evolution leads to an exponential loss of correlations, non-Markovianity can help to preserve correlations even in the limit $t rightarrow infty$. For covariant qubit evolutions, we also show that non-Markovianity can be used to preserve quantum coherence at all times, which is an important resource for quantum metrology. We explicitly demonstrate this effect experimentally with linear optics, by implementing the required evolution that is non-Markovian at all times.