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THU: Thursday Contributed Sessions

THU 9: Correlated Quantum Matter: Contributed Session to Symposium II

THU 9.2: Talk

Thursday, September 11, 2025, 14:30–14:45, ZHG101

Collective advantages in finite-time thermodynamics — •Alberto Rolandi^1,2, Paolo Abiuso³, and Martí Perarnau-Llobet^2,4 — ¹Atominstitut, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria — ²Département de Physique Appliquée, Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland — ³Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information - IQOQI, Vienna, Austria — ⁴Física Teòrica: Informació i Fenòmens Quàntics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain

A central task in finite-time thermodynamics is to minimize the excess or dissipated work W_diss when manipulating the state of a system in contact with 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 W_diss 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 W_diss with N: W_diss∝ N^x with x<1; to be contrasted to the expected W_diss∝ 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, however it requires long-range interactions. We further explore collective processes with spin models featuring two-body interactions and achieve noticeable gains (sub-linear scaling of the dissipation) under realistic levels of control in simple interaction architectures. As an application of these results, we focus on the erasure of information in finite time and prove a faster convergence to Landauer’s bound.

Keywords: finite time thermodynamics; landauer principle; master equation; critical dissipation