Tag Archives: thermodynamics

Identical twins and quantum entanglement

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“If I had a nickel for every unsolicited and very personal health question I’ve gotten at parties, I’d have paid off my medical school loans by now,” my doctor friend complained. As a physicist, I can somewhat relate. I occasionally find myself nodding along politely to people’s eccentric theories about the universe. A gentleman once explained to me how twin telepathy (the phenomenon where, for example, one twin feels the other’s pain despite being in separate countries) comes from twins’ brains being entangled in the womb. Entanglement is a nonclassical correlation that can exist between spatially separated systems. If two objects are entangled, it’s possible to know everything about both of them together but nothing about either one. Entangling two particles (let alone full brains) over tens of kilometres (let alone full countries) is incredibly challenging. “Using twins to study entanglement, that’ll be the day,” I thought. Well, my last paper did something like that. 

In theory, a twin study consists of two people that are as identical as possible in every way except for one. What that allows you to do is isolate the effect of that one thing on something else. Aleksander Lasek (postdoc at QuICS), David Huse (professor of physics at Princeton), Nicole Yunger Halpern (NIST physicist and Quantum Frontiers blogger), and I were interested in isolating the effects of quantities’ noncommutation (explained below) on entanglement. To do so, we first built a pair of twins and then compared them. 

Consider a well-insulated thermos filled with soup. The heat and the number of “soup particles” inside the thermos are conserved. So the energy and the number of “soup particles” are conserved quantities. In classical physics, conserved quantities commute. This means that we can simultaneously measure the amount of each conserved quantity in our system, like the energy and number of soup particles. However, in quantum mechanics, this needn’t be true. Measuring one property of a quantum system can change another measurement’s outcome.

Conserved quantities’ noncommutation in thermodynamics has led to some interesting results. For example, it’s been shown that conserved quantities’ noncommutation can decrease the rate of entropy production. For the purposes of this post, entropy production is something that limits engine efficiency—how well engines can convert fuel to useful work. For example, if your car engine had zero entropy production (which is impossible), it would convert 100% of the energy in your car’s fuel into work that moved your car along the road. Current car engines can convert about 30% of this energy, so it’s no wonder that people are excited about the prospective application of decreasing entropy production. Other results (like this one and that one) have connected noncommutation to potentially hindering thermalization—the phenomenon where systems interact until they have similar properties, like when a cup of coffee cools. Thermalization limits memory storage and battery lifetimes. Thus, learning how to resist thermalization could also potentially lead to better technologies, such as longer-lasting batteries. 

One can measure the amount of entanglement within a system, and as quantum particles thermalize, they entangle. Given the above results about thermalization, we might expect that noncommutation would decrease entanglement. Testing this expectation is where the twins come in.

Say we built a pair of twins that were identical in every way except for one. Nancy, the noncommuting twin, has some features that don’t commute, say, her hair colour and height. This means that if we measure her height, we’ll have no idea what her hair colour is. For Connor, the commuting twin, his hair colour and height commute, so we can determine them both simultaneously. Which twin has more entanglement? It turns out it’s Nancy.

Disclaimer: This paragraph is written for an expert audience. Our actual models consist of 1D chains of pairs of qubits. Each model has three conserved quantities (“charges”), which are sums over local charges on the sites. In the noncommuting model, the three local charges are tensor products of Pauli matrices with the identity (XI, YI, ZI). In the commuting model, the three local charges are tensor products of the Pauli matrices with themselves (XX, YY, ZZ). The paper explains in what sense these models are similar. We compared these models numerically and analytically in different settings suggested by conventional and quantum thermodynamics. In every comparison, the noncommuting model had more entanglement on average.

Our result thus suggests that noncommutation increases entanglement. So does charges’ noncommutation promote or hinder thermalization? Frankly, I’m not sure. But I’d bet the answer won’t be in the next eccentric theory I hear at a party.

Building a Koi pond with Lie algebras

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When I was growing up, one of my favourite places was the shabby all-you-can-eat buffet near our house. We’d walk in, my mom would approach the hostess to explain that, despite my being abnormally large for my age, I qualified for kids-eat-free, and I would peel away to stare at the Koi pond. The display of different fish rolling over one another was bewitching. Ten-year-old me would have been giddy to build my own Koi pond, and now I finally have. However, I built one using Lie algebras.

The different fish swimming in the Koi pond are, in many ways, like charges being exchanged between subsystems. A “charge” is any globally conserved quantity. Examples of charges include energy, particles, electric charge, or angular momentum. Consider a system consisting of a cup of coffee in your office. The coffee will dynamically exchange charges with your office in the form of heat energy. Still, the total energy of the coffee and office is conserved (assuming your office walls are really well insulated). In this example, we had one type of charge (heat energy) and two subsystems (coffee and office). Consider now a closed system consisting of many subsystems and many different types of charges. The closed system is like the finite Koi pond with different charges like the different fish species. The charges can move around locally, but the total number of charges is globally fixed, like how the fish swim around but can’t escape the pond. Also, the presence of one type of charge can alter another’s movement, just as a big fish might block a little one’s path. 

Unfortunately, the Koi pond analogy reaches its limit when we move to quantum charges. Classically, charges commute. This means that we can simultaneously determine the amount of each charge in our system at each given moment. In quantum mechanics, this isn’t necessarily true. In other words, classically, I can count the number of glossy fish and matt fish. But, in quantum mechanics, I can’t.

So why does this matter? Subsystems exchanging charges are prevalent in thermodynamics. Quantum thermodynamics extends thermodynamics to include small systems and quantum effects. Noncommutation underlies many important quantum phenomena. Hence, studying the exchange of noncommuting charges is pivotal in understanding quantum thermodynamics. Consequently, noncommuting charges have emerged as a rapidly growing subfield of quantum thermodynamics. Many interesting results have been discovered from no longer assuming that charges commute (such as these). Until recently, most of these discoveries have been theoretical. Bridging these discoveries to experimental reality requires Hamiltonians (functions that tell you how your system evolves in time) that move charges locally but conserve them globally. Last year it was unknown whether these Hamiltonians exist, what they look like generally, how to build them, and for what charges you could find them.

Nicole Yunger Halpern (NIST physicist, my co-advisor, and Quantum Frontiers blogger) and I developed a prescription for building Koi ponds for noncommuting charges. Our prescription allows you to systematically build Hamiltonians that overtly move noncommuting charges between subsystems while conserving the charges globally. These Hamiltonians are built using Lie algebras, abstract mathematical tools that can describe many physical quantities (including everything in the standard model of particle physics and space-time metric). Our results were recently published in npj QI. We hope that our prescription will bolster the efforts to bridge the results of noncommuting charges to experimental reality.

In the end, a little group theory was all I needed for my Koi pond. Maybe I’ll build a treehouse next with calculus or a remote control car with combinatorics.

What matters to me, and why?

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Students at my college asked every Tuesday. They gathered in a white, windowed room near the center of campus. “We serve,” read advertisements, “soup, bread, and food for thought.” One professor or visitor would discuss human rights, family,  religion, or another pepper in the chili of life.

I joined occasionally. I listened by the window, in the circle of chairs that ringed the speaker. Then I ventured from college into physics.

The questions “What matters to you, and why?” have chased me through physics. I ask experimentalists and theorists, professors and students: Why do you do science? Which papers catch your eye? Why have you devoted to quantum information more years than many spouses devote to marriages?

One physicist answered with another question. Chris Jarzynski works as a professor at the University of Maryland. He studies statistical mechanics—how particles typically act and how often particles act atypically; how materials shine, how gases push back when we compress them, and more.

“How,” Chris asked, “should we quantify precision?”

Chris had in mind nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems. Out-of-equilibrium systems have large-scale properties, like temperature, that change significantly.1 Examples include white-bean soup cooling at a “What matters” lunch. The soup’s temperature drops to room temperature as the system approaches equilibrium.

Steaming soup

Nonequilibrium. Tasty, tasty nonequilibrium.

Some out-of-equilibrium systems obey fluctuation theorems. Fluctuation theorems are equations derived in statistical mechanics. Imagine a DNA molecule floating in a watery solution. Water molecules buffet the strand, which twitches. But the strand’s shape doesn’t change much. The DNA is in equilibrium.

You can grab the strand’s ends and stretch them apart. The strand will leave equilibrium as its length changes. Imagine pulling the strand to some predetermined length. You’ll have exerted energy.

How much? The amount will vary if you repeat the experiment. Why? This trial began with the DNA curled this way; that trial began with the DNA curled that way. During this trial, the water batters the molecule more; during that trial, less. These discrepancies block us from predicting how much energy you’ll exert. But suppose you pick a number W. We can form predictions about the probability that you’ll have to exert an amount W of energy.

How do we predict? Using nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems.

Fluctuation theorems matter to me, as Quantum Frontiers regulars know. Why? Because I’ve written enough fluctuation-theorem articles to test even a statistical mechanic’s patience. More seriously, why do fluctuation theorems matter to me?

Fluctuation theorems fill a gap in the theory of statistical mechanics. Fluctuation theorems relate nonequilibrium processes (like the cooling of soup) to equilibrium systems (like room-temperature soup). Physicists can model equilibrium. But we know little about nonequilibrium. Fluctuation theorems bridge from the known (equilibrium) to the unknown (nonequilibrium).

Bridge - theory

Experiments take place out of equilibrium. (Stretching a DNA molecule changes the molecule’s length.) So we can measure properties of nonequilibrium processes. We can’t directly measure properties of equilibrium processes, which we can’t perform experimentally. But we can measure an equilibrium property indirectly: We perform nonequilibrium experiments, then plug our data into fluctuation theorems.

Bridge - exprmt

Which equilibrium property can we infer about? A free-energy difference, denoted by ΔF. Every equilibrated system (every room-temperature soup) has a free energy F. F represents the energy that the system can exert, such as the energy available to stretch a DNA molecule. Imagine subtracting one system’s free energy, F1, from another system’s free energy, F2. The subtraction yields a free-energy difference, ΔF = F2 – F1. We can infer the value of a ΔF from experiments.

How should we evaluate those experiments? Which experiments can we trust, and which need repeating?

Those questions mattered little to me, before I met Chris Jarzynski. Bridging equilibrium with nonequilibrium mattered to me, and bridging theory with experiment. Not experimental nitty-gritty.

I deserved a dunking in white-bean soup.

Dunk 2

Suppose you performed infinitely many trials—stretched a DNA molecule infinitely many times. In each trial, you measured the energy exerted. You processed your data, then substituted into a fluctuation theorem. You could infer the exact value of ΔF.

But we can’t perform infinitely many trials. Imprecision mars our inference about ΔF. How does the imprecision relate to the number of trials performed?2

Chris and I adopted an information-theoretic approach. We quantified precision with a parameter \delta. Suppose you want to estimate ΔF with some precision. How many trials should you expect to need to perform? We bounded the number N_\delta of trials, using an entropy. The bound tightens an earlier estimate of Chris’s. If you perform N_\delta trials, you can estimate ΔF with a percent error that we estimated. We illustrated our results by modeling a gas.

I’d never appreciated the texture and richness of precision. But richness precision has: A few decimal places distinguish Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity from Isaac Newton’s 17th-century mechanics. Particle physicists calculate constants of nature to many decimal places. Such a calculation earned a nod on physicist Julian Schwinger’s headstone. Precision serves as the bread and soup of much physics. I’d sniffed the importance of precision, but not tasted it, until questioned by Chris Jarzynski.

Schwinger headstone

The questioning continues. My college has discontinued its “What matters” series. But I ask scientist after scientist—thoughtful human being after thoughtful human being—“What matters to you, and why?” Asking, listening, reading, calculating, and self-regulating sharpen my answers those questions. My answers often squish beneath the bread knife in my cutlery drawer of criticism. Thank goodness that repeating trials can reduce our errors.

Bread knife

1Or large-scale properties that will change. Imagine connecting the ends of a charged battery with a wire. Charge will flow from terminal to terminal, producing a current. You can measure, every minute, how quickly charge is flowing: You can measure how much current is flowing. The current won’t change much, for a while. But the current will die off as the battery nears depletion. A large-scale property (the current) appears constant but will change. Such a capacity to change characterizes nonequilibrium steady states (NESSes). NESSes form our second example of nonequilibrium states. Many-body localization forms a third, quantum example.

2Readers might object that scientists have tools for quantifying imprecision. Why not apply those tools? Because ΔF equals a logarithm, which is nonlinear. Other authors’ proposals appear in references 1-13 of our paper. Charlie Bennett addressed a related problem with his “acceptance ratio.” (Bennett also blogged about evil on Quantum Frontiers last month.)

Discourse in Delft

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A camel strolled past, yards from our window in the Applied-Sciences Building.

I hadn’t expected to see camels at TU Delft, aka the Delft University of Technology, in Holland. I breathed, “Oh!” and turned to watch until the camel followed its turbaned leader out of sight. Nelly Ng, the PhD student with whom I was talking, followed my gaze and laughed.

Nelly works in Stephanie Wehner’s research group. Stephanie—a quantum cryptographer, information theorist, thermodynamicist, and former Caltech postdoc—was kind enough to host me for half August. I arrived at the same time as TU Delft’s first-year undergrads. My visit coincided with their orientation. The orientation involved coffee hours, team-building exercises, and clogging the cafeteria whenever the Wehner group wanted lunch.

And, as far as I could tell, a camel.

Not even a camel could unseat Nelly’s and my conversation. Nelly, postdoc Mischa Woods, and Stephanie are the Wehner-group members who study quantum and small-scale thermodynamics. I study quantum and small-scale thermodynamics, as Quantum Frontiers stalwarts might have tired of hearing. The four of us exchanged perspectives on our field.

Mischa knew more than Nelly and I about clocks; Nelly knew more about catalysis; and I knew more about fluctuation relations. We’d read different papers. We’d proved different theorems. We explained the same phenomena differently. Nelly and I—with Mischa and Stephanie, when they could join us—questioned and answered each other almost perpetually, those two weeks.

We talked in our offices, over lunch, in the group discussion room, and over tea at TU Delft’s Quantum Café. We emailed. We talked while walking. We talked while waiting for Stephanie to arrive so that she could talk with us.

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The site of many a tête-à-tête.

The copiousness of the conversation drained me. I’m an introvert, formerly “the quiet kid” in elementary school. Early some mornings in Delft, I barricaded myself in the visitors’ office. Late some nights, I retreated to my hotel room or to a canal bank. I’d exhausted my supply of communication; I had no more words for anyone. Which troubled me, because I had to finish a paper. But I regret not one discussion, for three reasons.

First, we relished our chats. We laughed together, poked fun at ourselves, commiserated about calculations, and confided about what we didn’t understand.

We helped each other understand, second. As I listened to Mischa or as I revised notes about a meeting, a camel would stroll past a window in my understanding. I’d see what I hadn’t seen before. Mischa might be explaining which quantum states represent high-quality clocks. Nelly might be explaining how a quantum state ξ can enable a state ρ to transform into a state σ. I’d breathe, “Oh!” and watch the mental camel follow my interlocutor through my comprehension.

Nelly’s, Mischa’s, and Stephanie’s names appear in the acknowledgements of the paper I’d worried about finishing. The paper benefited from their explanations and feedback.

Third, I left Delft with more friends than I’d had upon arriving. Nelly, Mischa, and I grew to know each other, to trust each other, to enjoy each other’s company. At the end of my first week, Nelly invited Mischa and me to her apartment for dinner. She provided pasta; I brought apples; and Mischa brought a sweet granola-and-seed mixture. We tasted and enjoyed more than we would have separately.

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Dinner with Nelly and Mischa.

I’ve written about how Facebook has enhanced my understanding of, and participation in, science. Research involves communication. Communication can challenge us, especially many of us drawn to science. Let’s shoulder past the barrier. Interlocutors point out camels—and hot-air balloons, and lemmas and theorems, and other sources of information and delight—that I wouldn’t spot alone.

With gratitude to Stephanie, Nelly, Mischa, the rest of the Wehner group (with whom I enjoyed talking), QuTech and TU Delft.

During my visit, Stephanie and Delft colleagues unveiled the “first loophole-free Bell test.” Their paper sent shockwaves (AKA camels) throughout the quantum community. Scott Aaronson explains the experiment here.

Toward physical realizations of thermodynamic resource theories

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“This is your arch-nemesis.”

The thank-you slide of my presentation remained onscreen, and the question-and-answer session had begun. I was presenting a seminar about thermodynamic resource theories (TRTs), models developed by quantum-information theorists for small-scale exchanges of heat and work. The audience consisted of condensed-matter physicists who studied graphene and photonic crystals. I was beginning to regret my topic’s abstractness.

The question-asker pointed at a listener.

“This is an experimentalist,” he continued, “your arch-nemesis. What implications does your theory have for his lab? Does it have any? Why should he care?”

I could have answered better. I apologized that quantum-information theorists, reared on the rarefied air of Dirac bras and kets, had developed TRTs. I recalled the baby steps with which science sometimes migrates from theory to experiment. I could have advocated for bounding, with idealizations, efficiencies achievable in labs. I should have invoked the connections being developed with fluctuation results, statistical mechanical theorems that have withstood experimental tests.

The crowd looked unconvinced, but I scored one point: The experimentalist was not my arch-nemesis.

“My new friend,” I corrected the questioner.

His question has burned in my mind for two years. Experiments have inspired, but not guided, TRTs. TRTs have yet to drive experiments. Can we strengthen the connection between TRTs and the natural world? If so, what tools must resource theorists develop to predict outcomes of experiments? If not, are resource theorists doing physics?

http://everystevejobsvideo.com/steve-jobs-qa-session-excerpt-following-antennagate-2010/

A Q&A more successful than mine.

I explore answers to these questions in a paper released today. Ian Durham and Dean Rickles were kind enough to request a contribution for a book of conference proceedings. The conference, “Information and Interaction: Eddington, Wheeler, and the Limits of Knowledge” took place at the University of Cambridge (including a graveyard thereof), thanks to FQXi (the Foundational Questions Institute).

What, I asked my advisor, does one write for conference proceedings?

“Proceedings are a great opportunity to get something off your chest,” John said.

That seminar Q&A had sat on my chest, like a pet cat who half-smothers you while you’re sleeping, for two years. Theorists often justify TRTs with experiments.* Experimentalists, an argument goes, are probing limits of physics. Conventional statistical mechanics describe these regimes poorly. To understand these experiments, and to apply them to technologies, we must explore TRTs.

Does that argument not merit testing? If experimentalists observe the extremes predicted with TRTs, then the justifications for, and the timeliness of, TRT research will grow.

http://maryqin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/

Something to get off your chest. Like the contents of a conference-proceedings paper, according to my advisor.

You’ve read the paper’s introduction, the first eight paragraphs of this blog post. (Who wouldn’t want to begin a paper with a mortifying anecdote?) Later in the paper, I introduce TRTs and their role in one-shot statistical mechanics, the analysis of work, heat, and entropies on small scales. I discuss whether TRTs can be realized and whether physicists should care. I identify eleven opportunities for shifting TRTs toward experiments. Three opportunities concern what merits realizing and how, in principle, we can realize it. Six adjustments to TRTs could improve TRTs’ realism. Two more-out-there opportunities, though less critical to realizations, could diversify the platforms with which we might realize TRTs.

One opportunity is the physical realization of thermal embezzlement. TRTs, like thermodynamic laws, dictate how systems can and cannot evolve. Suppose that a state R cannot transform into a state S: R \not\mapsto S. An ancilla C, called a catalyst, might facilitate the transformation: R + C \mapsto S + C. Catalysts act like engines used to extract work from a pair of heat baths.

Engines degrade, so a realistic transformation might yield S + \tilde{C}, wherein \tilde{C} resembles C. For certain definitions of “resembles,”** TRTs imply, one can extract arbitrary amounts of work by negligibly degrading C. Detecting the degradation—the work extraction’s cost—is difficult. Extracting arbitrary amounts of work at a difficult-to-detect cost contradicts the spirit of thermodynamic law.

The spirit, not the letter. Embezzlement seems physically realizable, in principle. Detecting embezzlement could push experimentalists’ abilities to distinguish between close-together states C and \tilde{C}. I hope that that challenge, and the chance to violate the spirit of thermodynamic law, attracts researchers. Alternatively, theorists could redefine “resembles” so that C doesn’t rub the law the wrong way.

http://www.eoht.info/page/Laws+of+thermodynamics+(game+version)

The paper’s broadness evokes a caveat of Arthur Eddington’s. In 1927, Eddington presented Gifford Lectures entitled The Nature of the Physical World. Being a physicist, he admitted, “I have much to fear from the expert philosophical critic.” Specializing in TRTs, I have much to fear from the expert experimental critic. The paper is intended to point out, and to initiate responses to, the lack of physical realizations of TRTs. Some concerns are practical; some, philosophical. I expect and hope that the discussion will continue…preferably with more cooperation and charity than during that Q&A.

If you want to continue the discussion, drop me a line.

*So do theorists-in-training. I have.

**A definition that involves the trace distance.

I spy with my little eye…something algebraic.

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Look at this picture.

Peter 1

Does any part of it surprise you? Look more closely.

Peter 2

Now? Try crossing your eyes.

Peter 3

Do you see a boy’s name?

I spell “Peter” with two e’s, but “Piotr” and “Pyotr” appear as authors’ names in papers’ headers. Finding “Petr” in a paper shouldn’t have startled me. But how often does “Gretchen” or “Amadeus” materialize in an equation?

When I was little, my reading list included Eye Spy, Where’s Waldo?, and Puzzle Castle. The books teach children to pay attention, notice details, and evaluate ambiguities.

That’s what physicists do. The first time I saw the picture above, I saw a variation on “Peter.” I was reading (when do I not?) about the intersection of quantum information and thermodynamics. The authors were discussing heat and algebra, not saints or boys who picked pecks of pickled peppers. So I looked more closely.

Each letter resolved into part of a story about a physical system. The P represents a projector. A projector is a mathematical object that narrows one’s focus to a particular space, as blinders on a horse do. The E tells us which space to focus on: a space associated with an amount E of energy, like a country associated with a GDP of $500 billion.

Some of the energy E belongs to a heat reservoir. We know so because “reservoir” begins with r, and R appears in the picture. A heat reservoir is a system, like a colossal bathtub, whose temperature remains constant. The Greek letter \tau, pronounced “tau,” represents the reservoir’s state. The reservoir occupies an equilibrium state: The bath’s large-scale properties—its average energy, volume, etc.—remain constant. Never mind about jacuzzis.

Piecing together the letters, we interpret the picture as follows: Imagine a vast, constant-temperature bathtub (R). Suppose we shut the tap long enough ago that the water in the tub has calmed (\tau). Suppose the tub neighbors a smaller system—say, a glass of Perrier.* Imagine measuring how much energy the bath-and-Perrier composite contains (P). Our measurement device reports the number E.

Quite a story to pack into five letters. Didn’t Peter deserve a second glance?

The equation’s right-hand side forms another story. I haven’t seen Peters on that side, nor Poseidons nor Gallahads. But look closely, and you will find a story.

 

The images above appear in “Fundamental limitations for quantum and nanoscale thermodynamics,” published by Michał Horodecki and Jonathan Oppenheim in Nature Communications in 2013.

 

*Experts: The ρS that appears in the first two images represents the smaller system. The tensor product represents the reservoir-and-smaller-system composite.

Generally speaking

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My high-school calculus teacher had a mustache like a walrus’s and shoulders like a rower’s. At 8:05 AM, he would demand my class’s questions about our homework. Students would yawn, and someone’s hand would drift into the air.

“I have a general question,” the hand’s owner would begin.

“Only private questions from you,” my teacher would snap. “You’ll be a general someday, but you’re not a colonel, or even a captain, yet.”

Then his eyes would twinkle; his voice would soften; and, after the student asked the question, his answer would epitomize why I’ve chosen a life in which I use calculus more often than laundry detergent.

http://www.sell-buy-machines.com/2013/02/why-prefer-second-hand-equipment-over-new.html

Many times though I witnessed the “general” trap, I fell into it once. Little wonder: I relish generalization as other people relish hiking or painting or Michelin-worthy relish. When inferring general principles from examples, I abstract away details as though they’re tomato stains. My veneration of generalization led me to quantum information (QI) theory. One abstract theory can model many physical systems: electrons, superconductors, ion traps, etc.

Little wonder that generalizing a QI model swallowed my summer.

QI has shed light on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which describe energy, information, and efficiency. Models called resource theories describe small systems’ energies, information, and efficiencies. Resource theories help us calculate a quantum system’s value—what you can and can’t create from a quantum system—if you can manipulate systems in only certain ways.

Suppose you can perform only operations that preserve energy. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, systems evolve toward equilibrium. Equilibrium amounts roughly to stasis: Averages of properties like energy remain constant.

Out-of-equilibrium systems have value because you can suck energy from them to power laundry machines. How much energy can you draw, on average, from a system in a constant-temperature environment? Technically: How much “work” can you draw? We denote this average work by < W >. According to thermodynamics, < W > equals the change ∆F in the system’s Helmholtz free energy. The Helmholtz free energy is a thermodynamic property similar to the energy stored in a coiled spring.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertyadvice/jeffhowell/8013593/Home-improvements-Slime-does-come-out-in-the-wash.html

One reason to study thermodynamics?

Suppose you want to calculate more than the average extractable work. How much work will you probably extract during some particular trial? Though statistical physics offers no answer, resource theories do. One answer derived from resource theories resembles ∆F mathematically but involves one-shot information theory, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.

If you average this one-shot extractable work, you recover < W > = ∆F. “Helmholtz” resource theories recapitulate statistical-physics results while offering new insights about single trials.

Helmholtz resource theories sit atop a silver-tasseled pillow in my heart. Why not, I thought, spread the joy to the rest of statistical physics? Why not generalize thermodynamic resource theories?

The average work <W > extractable equals ∆F if heat can leak into your system. If heat and particles can leak, <W > equals the change in your system’s grand potential. The grand potential, like the Helmholtz free energy, is a free energy that resembles the energy in a coiled spring. The grand potential characterizes Bose-Einstein condensates, low-energy quantum systems that may have applications to metrology and quantum computation. If your system responds to a magnetic field, or has mass and occupies a gravitational field, or has other properties, <W > equals the change in another free energy.

A collaborator and I designed resource theories that describe heat-and-particle exchanges. In our paper “Beyond heat baths: Generalized resource theories for small-scale thermodynamics,” we propose that different thermodynamic resource theories correspond to different interactions, environments, and free energies. I detailed the proposal in “Beyond heat baths II: Framework for generalized thermodynamic resource theories.”

“II” generalizes enough to satisfy my craving for patterns and universals. “II” generalizes enough to merit a hand-slap of a pun from my calculus teacher. We can test abstract theories only by applying them to specific systems. If thermodynamic resource theories describe situations as diverse as heat-and-particle exchanges, magnetic fields, and polymers, some specific system should shed light on resource theories’ accuracy.

If you find such a system, let me know. Much as generalization pleases aesthetically, the detergent is in the details.

Steampunk quantum

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A dark-haired man leans over a marble balustrade. In the ballroom below, his assistants tinker with animatronic elephants that trumpet and with potions for improving black-and-white photographs. The man is an inventor near the turn of the 20th century. Cape swirling about him, he watches technology wed fantasy.

Welcome to the steampunk genre. A stew of science fiction and Victorianism, steampunk has invaded literature, film, and the Wall Street Journal. A few years after James Watt improved the steam engine, protagonists build animatronics, clone cats, and time-travel. At sci-fi conventions, top hats and blast goggles distinguish steampunkers from superheroes.

Photo

The closest the author has come to dressing steampunk.

I’ve never read steampunk other than H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine—and other than the scene recapped above. The scene features in The Wolsenberg Clock, a novel by Canadian poet Jay Ruzesky. The novel caught my eye at an Ontario library.

In Ontario, I began researching the intersection of QI with thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of energy, efficiency, and entropy. Entropy quantifies uncertainty about a system’s small-scale properties, given large-scale properties. Consider a room of air molecules. Knowing that the room has a temperature of 75°F, you don’t know whether some molecule is skimming the floor, poking you in the eye, or elsewhere. Ambiguities in molecules’ positions and momenta endow the gas with entropy. Whereas entropy suggests lack of control, work is energy that accomplishes tasks.
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