Recent years are witnessing a renewed interest in thermodynamic applications at the nanoscale. Technological advances are leading to unprecedented levels of miniaturisation in the fabrication of microscopic engines capable of producing work. Recent experiments have produced engines built with only a few degrees of freedom, as for example a single electron transistor and the recently developed single ion engine. At the nanoscale, thermal fluctuations are quite strong and cannot be ignored any longer. Moreover, it is also expected that at these scales and for low temperatures quantum effects play a role in the fluctuations of fundamental thermodynamic quantities, such as energy, entropy, work and heat.
Quantum thermodynamics aims at understanding thermodynamic phenomena at the quantum scale. Novel relevant questions arise, such as: how do the laws of thermodynamics emerge in the this regime? What is the role of quantum coherences and correlations, for example entanglement, in the efficiency of a thermodynamic transformation? What is the maximum amount of work extractable from a reservoir? Quantum thermodynamics is also relevant for quantum information processing, as thermodynamic considerations play a fundamental role in the design of quantum information technologies, and to many-body physics, as concepts and tools from this field are needed for the design of many-particle quantum engines.
PLEASE NOTE: During the conference there will be an opportunity to present a poster. If you are interested in presenting a poster please visit the conference website and submit your title and abstract. Each poster board is 4 feet high x 6 feet wide. We ask that the posters be no larger than 44 inches high x 34 inches wide at the most. We will select some contributed talks and organize a poster session. If you wish to contribute with a talk or a poster please submit your abstract (pdf format, max 250 words) and title on the abstract submission form.
Important deadlines:
Preliminary list of speakers (more to come!)