The second law of thermodynamics in the quantum Brownian oscillator at an arbitrary temperature

I. Kim () and G. Mahler

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2007, vol. 60, issue 3, 401-408

Abstract: In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be expected to change due to system-bath entanglement. Here we show analytically that the work needed to couple a single linear oscillator with finite strength to a bath cannot be less than the work obtainable from the oscillator when it decouples from the bath. Therefore, the quantum second law holds for an arbitrary temperature. This is a generalization of the previous results for zero temperature [Ford and O'Connell, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 020402 (2006); Kim and Mahler, Eur. Phys. J. B 54, 405 (2006)]; in the high temperature limit we recover the classical behavior. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2007

Keywords: 03.65.Ud Entanglement and quantum nonlocality; 05.40.-a Fluctuation phenomena; random processes; noise; and Brownian motion; 05.70.-a Thermodynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00354-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:60:y:2007:i:3:p:401-408

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2007-00354-5

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().