Experimental implications of new developments in quantum thermodynamic theory

热力学是一种现象学理论，它允许研究宏观物体的平衡性质。基于基本的可测量量-热和功-它提供了一个通用的框架来研究不同形式的能量的转换。在工业革命初期引入，用于分析和改进新发明的蒸汽机的性能，从那时起，它已成功应用于设计各种有用的设备，从汽车发动机和冰箱到发电厂和太阳能电池。现在的技术进步越来越多地向纳米尺度和量子领域发展，在量子领域，热涨落与量子涨落相互竞争。然而，能够支持这些进步的量子热力学过程的详细数学和实践知识还没有得到很好的建立。直到最近才有一些理论发展，由不同的社区和不同的方法追求，开始填补这一空白，在非平衡量子涨落关系，单次射击热力学和热力学资源理论的突破。该项目的主要目的是确定这些不同的理论方法如何结合在一起，它们意味着什么实验预测，并尽可能将它们推广到一般的量子过程。这是朝着量子热力学统一理论框架迈出的重要一步，量子热力学可以支撑未来纳米级技术的发展，这些技术有望从计算机芯片应用到医学。

Thermodynamics is a phenomenological theory that allows the investigation of equilibrium properties of macroscopic objects. Based on fundamental measurable quantities - heat and work - it provides a universal framework to study the conversion of different forms of energy. Introduced at the beginning of the industrial revolution, to analyse and improve the performance of the newly invented steam engine, it has been successfully applied ever since to design a great variety of useful devices, from car engines and fridges to power plants and solar cells. Now technological progress is increasingly miniaturising to the nanoscale and into the quantum regime where thermal fluctuations compete with quantum fluctuations.Detailed mathematical and practical knowledge of quantum thermodynamic processes that can support these advances is however not well-established. Only recently have a number of theoretical developments, pursued by different communities and with different methods, started to fill this gap with breakthroughs in non-equilibrium quantum fluctuation relations, single shot thermodynamics and thermodynamic resource theory. The key aim of the project is to identify how these disparate theoretical approaches fit together, what experimental predictions they imply, and to generalise them to general quantum processes whenever possible. This is an essential step towards a unified theoretical framework for quantum thermodynamics that can underpin future technological development at the nanoscale that promise to have applications from computer chips to medicine.