Universal thermodynamic implementation of a process with a variable work cost

Quantum Physics arXiv:2601.20155 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 28 Jan 2026] Title:Universal thermodynamic implementation of a process with a variable work cost Authors:Philippe Faist View a PDF of the paper titled Universal thermodynamic implementation of a process with a variable work cost, by Philippe Faist View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The minimum amount of thermodynamic work required in order to implement a quantum computation or a quantum state transformation can be quantified using frameworks based on the resource theory of thermodynamics, deeply rooted in the works of Landauer and Bennett. For instance, the work we need to invest in order to implement $n$ independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) copies of a quantum channel is quantified by the thermodynamic capacity of the channel when we require the implementation's accuracy to be guaranteed in diamond norm over the $n$-system input. Recent work showed that work extraction can be implemented universally, meaning the same implementation works for a large class of input states, while achieving a variable work cost that is optimal for each individual i.i.d. input state. Here, we revisit some techniques leading to derivation of the thermodynamic capacity, and leverage them to construct a thermodynamic implementation of $n$ i.i.d. copies of any time-covariant quantum channel, up to some process decoherence that is necessary because the implementation reveals the amount of consumed work. The protocol uses so-called thermal operations and achieves the optimal per-input work cost for any i.i.d. input state; it relies on the conditional erasure protocol in our earlier work, adjusted to yield variable work. We discuss the effect of the work-cost decoherence. While it can significantly corrupt the correlations between the output state and any reference system, we show that for any time-covariant i.i.d. input state, the state on the output system faithfully reproduces that of the desired process to be implemented. As an immediate consequence of our results, we recover recent results for optimal work extraction from i.i.d. states up to the error scaling and implementation specifics, and propose an optimal preparation protocol for time-covariant i.i.d. states. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2601.20155 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2601.20155v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.20155 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Philippe Faist [view email] [v1] Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:26:34 UTC (645 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Universal thermodynamic implementation of a process with a variable work cost, by Philippe FaistView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-01 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)