"Take this hot cup of coffee and this cold jug of milk, the Brazilian physicist said as we sat in a café in Copenhagen. Bring them into contact and, sure enough, heat will flow from the hot object to the cold one, just as the German scientist Rudolf Clausius first stated formally in 1850. However, in some cases, de Oliveira explained, physicists have learned that the laws of quantum mechanics can drive heat flow the opposite way: from cold to hot."
"Physicists began to appreciate the subtlety of this situation more than two decades ago and have been exploring the quantum mechanical version of the second law ever since. Now, de Oliveira, a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, and colleagues have shown that the kind of "anomalous heat flow" that's enabled at the quantum scale could have a convenient and ingenious use."
Heat classically flows from hotter bodies to colder ones according to the second law of thermodynamics. Quantum mechanics can, under certain conditions, cause heat to flow from colder bodies to hotter ones. This anomalous heat flow does not violate the second law because Clausius' formulation is the classical limit of a fuller quantum description. Physicists have investigated the quantum version of the second law for decades. Recent work shows that quantum-enabled anomalous heat flow can function as a practical, noninvasive probe of quantumness such as superposition and entanglement, enabling detection without destroying the quantum state.
#quantum-thermodynamics #anomalous-heat-flow #quantum-entanglement-detection #second-law-of-thermodynamics
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