The Unruh Quantum Otto Engine

We introduce a quantum heat engine performing an Otto cycle by using the thermal properties of the quantum vacuum. Since Hawking and Unruh, it has been established that the vacuum space, either near a black hole or for an accelerated observer, behaves as a bath of thermal radiation. In this work, we present a fully quantum Otto cycle, which relies on the Unruh effect for a single quantum bit (qubit) in contact with quantum vacuum fluctuations. By using the notions of quantum thermodynamics and perturbation theory we obtain that the quantum vacuum can exchange heat and produce work on the qubit. Moreover, we obtain the efficiency and derive the conditions to have both a thermodynamic and a kinematic cycle in terms of the initial populations of the excited state, which define a range of allowed accelerations for the Unruh engine.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figure

Nonviolation of Bell's Inequality in Translation Invariant Systems

The nature of quantum correlations in strongly correlated systems has been a subject of intense research. In particular, it has been realized that entanglement and quantum discord are present at quantum phase transitions and able to characterize it. Surprisingly, it has been shown for a number of different systems that qubit pairwise states, even when highly entangled, do not violate Bell's inequalities, being in this sense local. Here we show that such a local character of quantum correlations is in fact general for translation invariant systems and has its origins in the monogamy trade-off obeyed by tripartite Bell correlations. We illustrate this result in a quantum spin chain with a soft breaking of translation symmetry. In addition, we extend the monogamy inequality to the $N$-qubit scenario, showing that the bound increases with $N$ and providing examples of its saturation through uniformly generated random pure states.Comment: Published erratum added at the en