1207.0434 (Dario Egloff et al.)

Laws of thermodynamics beyond the von Neumann regime    [PDF]

Dario Egloff, Oscar C. O. Dahlsten, Renato Renner, Vlatko Vedral

Standard thermodynamics is associated with the von Neumann entropy. There has recently been great interest in making thermodynamics more suitable for the quantum and nano-regime by taking inspiration from single-shot information theory, which replaces the von Neumann entropy with the more general smooth entropies. These reduce to the von Neumann entropy in the regime of asymptotically many identical and uncorrelated systems, the von Neumann regime. We propose generalisations of the laws of thermodynamics which analogously reduce to the standard laws in that same limit. We motivate these by analysing a very generic Szilard-engine model. We derive how much work one can extract in a single extraction as a function of the success-probability. Neither the initial nor final state is required to be thermal. In the appropriate limits we recover existing results.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0434