On Identification of Heat and Work in Quantum Many-Body Systems with Local Operations and Classical Communication

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00993v1
• Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:42:59 GMT
• Title: On Identification of Heat and Work in Quantum Many-Body Systems with Local Operations and Classical Communication
• Abstract summary: How we identify heat and work is a fundamental question in modern quantum thermodynamics.<n>We consider a quantum many-body system from which we extract energy by local operations and classical communication.<n>The central idea to define heat and work unambiguously is based on a sharp insight into the optimization condition of LOCC.
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• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: How we identify heat and work is a fundamental question in modern quantum thermodynamics. Usually, heat and work are attributed to changes in the density matrix and the Hamiltonian, respectively, during time-evolution processes in quantum systems. Recently, it has been recognized that this identification is ambiguous. Furthermore, quantum thermodynamics involving quantum measurement is still under development. Motivated by these on-going works, we consider a quantum many-body system from which we extract energy by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) according to the quantum energy teleportation (QET) protocol. The central idea to define heat and work unambiguously is based on a sharp insight into the optimization condition of LOCC. When LOCC is optimized, the extractable energy by QET becomes a daemonic ergotropy; thus, it can be attributed as work. On the other hand, when LOCC is not optimized, we have not squeezed out all the energy with the unitary operation. It means there is uncontrollable energy left in the system. The uncontrollable energy can be attributed as heat after careful treatment of many-body interactions. The heat term consists of nonlocal correlation due to communication between remote participants, and the correlation cannot be directly observed for the participant in the subsystem. Thus, this feature is consistent with the traditional perspective of heat as an uncontrollable energy. To deeply understand the nature of heat, we derive two types of generalized Clausius inequality in our effective quantum thermodynamics, and discuss the direction of the inequality. To justify our perspective, we examine a one-dimensional Kitaev-like model and discuss the physical meaning of effective temperature in our thermodynamics.

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