From the Unknown to the Desired: Transforming Unknown Initial States in the Resource Theory of Work and Heat

Abstract:We study thermodynamic state transformations in the resource theory of work and heat when the initial quantum state is unknown. Moving beyond state-dependent protocols, we develop a universal framework in which a single transformation applies to all admissible input states. For mutually commuting conserved charges, we construct charge-conserving protocols whose transformation error, quantified by trace distance, decays super-polynomially with the number of system copies. As an application, we demonstrate universal work extraction: asymptotically optimal work can be extracted without microscopic knowledge of the initial state, with a super-polynomially small error. Our results show that thermodynamic state transformations remain achievable under limited prior information and establish a universal framework for resource-theoretic thermodynamics beyond the state-aware setting.

arXiv:2609.09352 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.09352v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09352 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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