IQI Weekly Seminar

  For isolated quantum systems thermodynamic work is usually defined within the two-time energy measurement approach. In this talk we will discuss recent developments and generalizations of this paradigm. To this end, we will show that the notion of quantum work and its corresponding fluctuation theorems are not only of thermodynamic relevance, but that they are also of interest to quantum information theory. After establishing the conceptual framework we will solve several pedagogical, yet experimentally relevant, examples analytically. In particular, we will discuss thermodynamic work for relativistic quantum mechanics described by the Dirac equation, before we will generalize the quantum fluctuation theorem to PT-symmetric quantum mechanics with unbroken PT-symmetry.