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Comment on "Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime"

Hal Tasaki
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Abstract

Recently Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0006404) argued that the second law of thermodynamics may be violated in a quantum system as a "consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the bath." By using a standard result about relative entropy, we prove rigorously that the second law is never violated (and, in particular, a perpetual motion of the second kind can never be realized) in quantum systems no matter how strong ``quantum coherence'' is or no matter how far one goes from equilibrium.

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Hal Tasaki. 2000-11-21. Comment on "Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime". https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0011099

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