Heat pump driven entirely by quantum correlation

Abstract

The second law of thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous heat from a cold to a hot body. However, it has been theoretically and experimentally shown that energy can flow from a cold to a hot body if the bodies are initially correlated. We investigated the \emph{anomalous energy exchange} between dissipation-less quantum systems that are initially entangled. Then, we extended this model to include dissipation demonstrating \emph{anomalous heat} from a cold to a hot body. Based on these models, we constructed a heat pump driven entirely by quantum correlation as fuel and investigated its performance with numerical simulations. Using the recently proposed definition of efficiency based on mutual information, the performance of the pump is found to be consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.