Researchers at the University of Basel have introduced a new way to apply thermodynamic principles to very small quantum systems.
The story of thermodynamics traces back to 1798, when officer and physicist Benjamin Thompson (a.k.a. Count Rumford) studied the drilling of cannon barrels in Munich and realized that heat is not a physical substance but can be produced endlessly through mechanical friction.
To explore this idea, Rumford placed the heated barrels in water and timed how long it took for the water to boil. Experiments like these eventually helped shape the field of thermodynamics in the 19th century, a period when the discipline played a key role in the Industrial Revolution by revealing how heat could be converted into useful work in devices such as steam engines.
Today, the major laws of thermodynamics form essential knowledge across the natural sciences. They state that the total energy, which includes both heat and work, remains constant in a closed system, and that entropy, which represents disorder, cannot decrease.
These laws are generally valid, but when trying to apply them to the smallest quantum systems, one quickly runs into difficulties. A team of researchers at the University of Basel, led by Professor Patrick Potts, has now found a new way to define thermodynamic quantities consistently for certain quantum systems. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
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