Autonomous Quantum Devices: When Are They Realizable without Additional Thermodynamic Costs?

Abstract: The resource theory of quantum thermodynamics has been a very successful theory and has generated much follow-up work in the community. It requires energy-preserving unitary operations to be implemented over a system, bath, and catalyst as part of its paradigm. So far, such unitary operations have been considered a "free" resource in the theory. However, this is only an idealization of a necessarily inexact process. Here, we include an additional auxiliary control system which can autonomously implement the unitary by turning an interaction "on or off". However, the control system will inevitably be degraded by the backaction caused by the implementation of the unitary. We derive conditions on the quality of the control device so that the laws of thermodynamics do not change and prove - by utilizing a good quantum clock - that the laws of quantum mechanics allow the backreaction to be small enough so that these conditions are satisfiable. Our inclusion of nonidealized control into the resource framework also raises interesting prospects, which were absent when considering idealized control. Among other things, the emergence of a third law without the need for the assumption of a light cone. Our results and framework unify the field of autonomous thermal machines with the thermodynamic quantum resource-theoretic one, and lay the groundwork for all quantum processing devices to be unified with fully autonomous machines.