The ability of the internal states of a working fluid to be in a coherent superposition is one of the basic properties of a quantum heat engine. It was recently predicted that in the regime of small engine action, this ability can enable a quantum heat engine to produce more power than any equivalent classical heat engine. It was also predicted that in the same regime, the presence of such internal coherence causes different types of quantum heat engines to become thermodynamically equivalent. Here, we use an ensemble of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond for implementing two types of quantum heat engines, and experimentally observe both effects.

The main thread that links classical thermodynamics and the thermodynamics of small quantum systems is the celebrated Clausius inequality form of the second law. However, its application to small quantum systems suffers from two cardinal problems. (i) The Clausius inequality does not hold when the system and environment are initially correlated—a commonly encountered scenario in microscopic setups. (ii) In some other cases, the Clausius inequality does not provide any useful information (e.g., in dephasing scenarios). We address these deficiencies by developing the notion of global passivity and employing it as a tool for deriving thermodynamic inequalities on observables. For initially uncorrelated thermal environments the global passivity framework recovers the Clausius inequality. More generally, global passivity provides an extension of the Clausius inequality that holds even in the presences of strong initial system-environment correlations. Crucially, the present framework provides additional thermodynamic bounds on expectation values. To illustrate the role of the additional bounds, we use them to detect unaccounted heat leaks and weak feedback operations (“Maxwell demons”) that the Clausius inequality cannot detect. In addition, it is shown that global passivity can put practical upper and lower bounds on the buildup of system-environment correlations for dephasing interactions. Our findings are highly relevant for experiments in various systems such as ion traps, superconducting circuits, atoms in optical cavities, and more.

Thermal Markovian dynamics is typically obtained by coupling a system to a sufficiently hot bath with a large heat capacity. Here we present a scheme for inducing Markovian dynamics using an arbitrarily small and cold heat bath. The scheme is based on injecting phase noise to the small bath. Markovianity emerges when the dephasing rate is larger than the system-bath coupling. Several unique signatures of small baths are studied. We discuss realizations in ion traps and superconducting qubits and show that it is possible to create an ideal setting where the system dynamics is indifferent to the internal bath dynamics.

Collective behavior, where a set of elements interact and generate effects that are beyond the reach of the individual noninteracting elements, is always of great interest in physics. Quantum collective effects that have no classical analog are even more intriguing. In this work, we show how to construct collective quantum heat machines and explore their performance boosts with respect to regular machines. Without interactions between the machines, the individual units operate in a stochastic, nonquantum manner. The construction of the collective machine becomes possible by introducing two simple quantum operations: coherence extraction and coherence injection. Together, these operations can harvest coherence from one engine and use it to boost the performance of a slightly different engine. For weakly driven engines, we show that the collective work output scales quadratically with the number of engines rather than linearly. Eventually, the boost saturates and then becomes linear. Nevertheless, even in saturation, work is still significantly boosted compared to individual operation. To study the reversibility of the collective machine, we introduce the “entropy-pollution” measure. It is shown that there is a regime where the collective machine is N times more reversible while producing N times more work, compared to the individual operation of N units. Moreover, the collective machine can even be more reversible than the most reversible unit in the collective. This high level of reversibility becomes possible due to a special symbiotic mechanism between engine pairs.