Speaker
Description
A central task in finite-time thermodynamics is to minimize the excess or dissipated work, Wdiss, when manipulating the state of a system immersed in a thermal bath. We consider this task for an N-body system, whose constituents are identical and uncorrelated at the beginning and end of the process. In the regime of slow but finite-time processes, we show that Wdiss can be dramatically reduced by considering collective protocols in which interactions are suitably created along the protocol. This can even lead to a sub-linear growth of Wdiss with N: Wdiss∼N^x with x<1; to be contrasted to the expected Wdiss∼N satisfied in any non-interacting protocol. We derive the fundamental limits to such collective advantages and show that x=0 is in principle possible, which however requires highly non-local N-body interactions. We then explore collective processes with realistic many-body interacting models, in particular a 1D spin chain and an all-to-all spin model, achieving noticeable gains under realistic levels of control. As an application of these results, we focus on the erasure of information in finite time, and prove a faster convergence to Landauer's erasure bound.
