New Special Issue "Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics in the Quantum Regime"
Dear Colleagues,
Despite the many new developments of the last 20 years, many fundamental problems of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics still wait for a solution in the quantum regime. Heat, work, and entropy production in driven small quantum systems have been investigated both theoretically and experimentally, but a full understanding of the role of quantum effects is still elusive. The issue is even more complicated when considering quantum many-body systems, where quantum and classical correlations and coherences interlace with one another. Yet, it is not clear how to disentangle them in general, and when that has been achieved in specific cases, quantum coherence and correlations have been observed to be accompanied either by an improvement or by a worsening of the performances of quantum devices with respect to their corresponding classical counterparts. Can we understand these behaviors in general terms and trace them back to their fundamental explanations?
Furthermore, the invasiveness of quantum measurements is a genuinely quantum effect: its potential as a fuel for quantum thermal machines has been demonstrated theoretically, but experiments have yet to confirm the theory.
Under what circumstances are quantum effects relevant for heat and work manipulation at the quantum level? How do they enter the functioning of heat engines? To what extent can they be exploited in order to obtain advantages in specific figures of merit, and in which operating regimes is this possible at all?
From a more fundamental point of view, a unified description of all the sources of irreversibility in the quantum regime needs to be further developed, both through theory and experiments.
Prof. Michele Campisi
Prof. Francesco Plastina
Guest Editors
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/thermo_regime