Venue: 3.21 Berry Lecture Theatre, HH Wills Physics Labs Building, Tyndall Ave, 3pm

We would like to invite you to attend the Physics Colloquium, which will be held at 3pm on Mondays in 3.21, the Berry Lecture Theatre. The colloquia will be followed by tea and coffee in the staff coffee room. We hope to see you there!

The most imminent event in the series, on the 13th March, will be presented by Irene D'Amico (Professor, Engineering and Technology, University of York). Click here for a PDF of the abstract: Colloquium Poster 13th March 2023 (PDF, 540kB)‌

Abstract:

Quantum thermodynamics takes advantage of thermal – and quantum – fluctuations to create engines and refrigerators of sizes well below the thermodynamic limit and properties still under discussion. Indeed, quantum thermodynamics extends concepts, such as heat, work, and entropy to fewparticle quantum systems. Here thermodynamic probability distributions contain information about the possible transitions between eigenstates, as well as on thermal and quantum fluctuations. Identification of nonclassical features in work and heat distributions of interacting quantum systems is a topic under investigation. In this talk, we consider microscopic models for strongly correlated systems undergoing non-equilibrium finite-time and/or sudden-quench processes at finite temperatures. First, we will discuss the effect of many-body interactions and quantum phase transitions on thermodynamic probability distributions. Here we will be observing nonhomogeneous one-dimensional Hubbard chains driven across different quantum phase transitions. Later we will describe how quantum coherences generated via many-body interactions can influence the performance of few-particle quantum engines, and in particular how it can be used to boost their efficiency.