Dynamical Casimir effect and minimal temperature in quantum thermodynamics

Benenti, Giuliano; Strini, G.

doi:10.1103/physreva.91.020502

Cited by 24 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(64 reference statements)

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“…There were indications that it might not always be valid [231,[281][282][283], followed by a number of claims that it is valid [284][285][286][287][288][289]. It has also been shown [290] that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limitation for cooling by cyclic engines of the type discussed in section 11, whose origin is rooted in the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) (for a review of this and other quantum vacuum amplification phenomena see [291]). The DCE concerns the generation of photons from the vacuum due to time-dependent boundary conditions or more generally to the change of some parameters of a system.…”

Section: The Bekenstein-pendry Bound On Heat Flow and Nernst's Unattamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ref. [290] considered a reciprocating refrigerator, operating by means of a working medium (a single mode of the electromagnetic field, that is, a harmonic oscillator, with a time-dependent frequency), shuttling heat from a cold finite-size "bath" (a single qubit) to a hot bath. The working medium undergoes a four-stroke Otto cycle.…”

Section: The Bekenstein-pendry Bound On Heat Flow and Nernst's Unattamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale

et al. 2017

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In recent years, the study of heat to work conversion has been re-invigorated by nanotechnology. Steady-state devices do this conversion without any macroscopic moving parts, through steady-state flows of microscopic particles such as electrons, photons, phonons, etc. This review aims to introduce some of the theories used to describe these steady-state flows in a variety of mesoscopic or nanoscale systems. These theories are introduced in the context of idealized machines which convert heat into electrical power (heat-engines) or convert electrical power into a heat flow (refrigerators). In this sense, the machines could be categorized as thermoelectrics, although this should be understood to include photovoltaics when the heat source is the sun. As quantum mechanics is important for most such machines, they fall into the field of quantum thermodynamics. In many cases, the machines we consider have few degrees of freedom, however the reservoirs of heat and work that they interact with are assumed to be macroscopic. This review discusses different theories which can take into account different aspects of mesoscopic and nanoscale physics, such as coherent quantum transport, magnetic-field induced effects (including topological ones such as the quantum Hall effect), and single electron charging effects. It discusses the efficiency of thermoelectric conversion, and the thermoelectric figure of merit. More specifically, the theories presented are (i) linear response theory with or without magnetic fields, (ii) Landauer scattering theory in the linear response regime and far from equilibrium, (iii) Green-Kubo formula for strongly interacting systems within the linear response regime, (iv) rate equation analysis for small quantum machines with or without interaction effects, (v) stochastic thermodynamic for fluctuating small systems. In all cases, we place particular emphasis on the fundamental questions about the bounds on ideal machines. Can magnetic-fields change the bounds on power or efficiency? What is the relationship between quantum theories of transport and the laws of thermodynamics? Does quantum mechanics place fundamental bounds on heat to work conversion which are absent in the thermodynamics of classical systems?

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Section: The Bekenstein-pendry Bound On Heat Flow and Nernst's Unattamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Bekenstein-pendry Bound On Heat Flow and Nernst's Unattamentioning

confidence: 99%

Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale

et al. 2017

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“…In this paper we focus on the analysis of the ultimate cooling limit of a class of refrigerators which are externally driven (a situation which is the most important one in practical realizations). We recently presented a detailed analysis of the behavior of a class of quantum refrigerators [11] (linear, externally driven fridges) for which it is possible to identify a very general process as the one responsible for imposing the fundamental limitation for cooling: Such process is nothing but pair creation (a process which is relevant, as discussed below, in other areas of physics and is closely related with the main mechanism behind the so called dynamical Casimir arXiv:1710.11554v1 [quant-ph] 31 Oct 2017 effect, DCE [11,12]). In fact, our work analyzed a family of linear machines consisting of arbitrary harmonic networks which are parametrically driven while connected with an arbitrary number of bosonic reservoirs, prepared at arbitrary temperatures and characterized by generic spectral densities (see below).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooling a quantum oscillator: A useful analogy to understand laser cooling as a thermodynamical process

Freitas

Paz

2018

Phys. Rev. A

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We analyze the lowest achievable temperature for a mechanical oscillator (representing, for example, the motion of a single trapped ion) which is coupled with a driven quantum refrigerator. The refrigerator is composed of a parametrically driven system (which we also consider to be a single oscillator in the simplest case) which is coupled to a reservoir where the energy is dumped. We show that the cooling of the oscillator (that can be achieved due to the resonant transport of its phonon excitations into the environment) is always stopped by a fundamental heating process that is always dominant at sufficiently low temperatures. This process can be described as the non resonant production of excitation pairs. This result is in close analogy with the recent study that showed that pair production is responsible for enforcing the validity of the dynamical version of the third law of thermodynamics (Phys. Rev. E 95, 012146). Interestingly, we relate our model to the usual ones used to describe laser cooling of a single trapped ion and reobtaining the correct limiting temperatures for the limits of resolved and non-resolved sidebands. Our findings (that also serve to estimate the lowest temperatures that can be achieved in a variety of other situations) indicate that the limit for laser cooling can also be associated with non resonant pair production. In fact, as we show, this is the case: The limiting temperature for laser cooling is achieved when the cooling transitions induced by the resonant transport of excitations from the motion into the electromagnetic environment is compensated by the heating transitions induced by the creation of phonon-photon pairs.

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“…Another possibility would be to harvest the entanglement by inserting localised detectors, such as an atomic qubit. This has been discussed in a range of settings in [30,31,32,33,34,35] and the references therein.…”

Section: Semiopen Waveguidementioning

confidence: 99%

Superconducting circuit boundary conditions beyond the dynamical Casimir effect

Doukas

Louko

2015

Phys. Rev. D

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We study analytically the time-dependent boundary conditions of superconducting microwave circuit experiments in the high plasma frequency limit, in which the conditions are Robin-type and relate the value of the field to the spatial derivative of the field. We give an explicit solution to the field evolution for boundary condition modulations that are small in magnitude but may have arbitrary time dependence, in a formalism that applies both to a semiopen waveguide and to a closed waveguide with two independently adjustable boundaries. The correspondence between the microwave Robin boundary conditions and the mechanicallymoving Dirichlet boundary conditions of the Dynamical Casimir Effect is shown to break down at high field frequencies, approximately one order of magnitude above the frequencies probed in the 2011 experiment of Wilson et al. Our results bound the parameter regime in which a microwave circuit can be used to model relativistic effects in a mechanically-moving cavity, and they show that beyond this parameter regime moving mirrors produce more particles and generate more entanglement than their non-moving microwave waveguide simulations.

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Dynamical Casimir effect and minimal temperature in quantum thermodynamics

Cited by 24 publications

References 42 publications

Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale

Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale

Cooling a quantum oscillator: A useful analogy to understand laser cooling as a thermodynamical process

Superconducting circuit boundary conditions beyond the dynamical Casimir effect

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