Recent years are witnessing a renewed interest in thermodynamic applications at the nanoscale. Technological advances are leading to unprecedented levels of miniaturisation in the fabrication of microscopic engines capable of producing work. Recent experiments have produced engines built with only a few degrees of freedom, as for example a single electron transistor and the recently developed single ion engine. At the nanoscale, thermal fluctuations are quite strong and cannot be ignored any longer. Moreover, it is also expected that at these scales and for low temperatures quantum effects play a role in the fluctuations of fundamental thermodynamic quantities, such as energy, entropy, work and heat.
Quantum thermodynamics aims at understanding thermodynamic phenomena at the quantum scale. Novel relevant questions arise, such as: how do the laws of thermodynamics emerge in the this regime? What is the role of quantum coherences and correlations, for example entanglement, in the efficiency of a thermodynamic transformation? What is the maximum amount of work extractable from a reservoir? Quantum thermodynamics is also relevant for quantum information processing, as thermodynamic considerations play a fundamental role in the design of quantum information technologies, and to many-body physics, as concepts and tools from this field are needed for the design of many-particle quantum engines.
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