General quantum resources provide advantages in work extraction tasks
Chung-Yun Hsieh, Manuel Gessner
TL;DR
The paper identifies a thermodynamic universal resource certification class (URCC) demonstrating that general quantum resources, including states and channels, can provide concrete advantages in work extraction tasks. It develops two complementary routes: (i) discrimination-task-based URCCs for channel ensembles through ensemble state discrimination, and (ii) work-extraction-based URCCs via energy-storage enhancements, establishing that $oldsymbol{ extcal{E}} otin rak{F}_R$ iff there exists a task whose performance exceeds all free resources. Moreover, the work shows that entanglement can be certified in a one-sided device-independent manner through steering, and reveals a novel anomalous energy flow that arises from entanglement and measurement incompatibility, with potential to witness and quantify quantum resources thermodynamically. Together, these results bridge quantum resource theories with thermodynamics, offering practical methods to certify broad quantum phenomena and highlighting new links between information, entanglement, and energy flow. The findings have implications for quantum batteries, resource-based thermodynamics, and the operational understanding of quantum incompatibility and steering in thermodynamic tasks.
Abstract
In developing quantum science and technologies, it is essential to demonstrate the so-called quantum advantages, which are performances that can be achieved only with the assistance of quantum resources. Most of the time, different quantum features lead to different advantages. Interestingly, there are certain classes of tasks where quantum advantages are achievable by general quantum resources. This work reports such a class of tasks in thermodynamics -- we provide a work extraction task that certifies general quantum resources of both states and channels, suggesting general quantum effects can provide non-classical advantages in work extraction. We also show that such work extraction tasks can be applied to certify quantum entanglement in a one-sided device-independent way. As an application, we report a novel type of anomalous energy flow -- a type of locally extractable energy that is attributed to the globally distributed entanglement. Finally, we show that the existence of this novel anomalous energy flow is equivalent to measurement incompatibility.