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

Multipartite Entanglement Signature of Quantum Phase Transitions

We derive a general relation between the non-analyticities of the ground state energy and those of a subclass of the multipartite generalized global entanglement (GGE) measure defined by T. R. de Oliveira et al. [Phys. Rev. A 73, 010305(R) (2006)] for many-particle systems. We show that GGE signals both a critical point location and the order of a quantum phase transition (QPT). We also show that GGE allows us to study the relation between multipartite entanglement and QPTs, suggesting that multipartite but not bipartite entanglement is favored at the critical point. Finally, using GGE we were able, at a second order QPT, to define a diverging entanglement length (EL) in terms of the usual correlation length. We exemplify this with the XY spin-1/2 chain and show that the EL is half the correlation length.Comment: Published version. Incorporates correction made in erratu

Overcoming ambiguities in classical and quantum correlation measures

We identify ambiguities in the available frameworks for defining quantum, classical, and total correlations as measured by discordlike quantifiers. More specifically, we determine situations for which either classical or quantum correlations are not uniquely defined due to degeneracies arising from the optimization procedure over the state space. In order to remove such degeneracies, we introduce a general approach where correlations are independently defined, escaping therefore from a degenerate subspace. As an illustration, we analyze the trace-norm geometric quantum discord for two-qubit Bell-diagonal states.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. v2: Minor corrections. Published versio

Operational Classification and Quantification of Multipartite Entangled States

We formalize and extend an operational multipartite entanglement measure introduced by T. R. Oliveira, G. Rigolin, and M. C. de Oliveira, Phys. Rev. A 73, 010305(R) (2006), through the generalization of global entanglement (GE) [D. A. Meyer and N. R. Wallach, J. Math. Phys. 43, 4273 (2002)]. Contrarily to GE the main feature of this measure lies in the fact that we study the mean linear entropy of all possible partitions of a multipartite system. This allows the construction of an operational multipartite entanglement measure which is able to distinguish among different multipartite entangled states that GE failed to discriminate. Furthermore, it is also maximum at the critical point of the Ising chain in a transverse magnetic field, being thus able to detect a quantum phase transition.Comment: 14 pages, RevTex4, published versio

Geometric classical and total correlations via trace distance

We introduce the concepts of geometric classical and total correlations through Schatten 1-norm (trace norm), which is the only Schatten p-norm able to ensure a well-defined geometric measure of correlations. In particular, we derive the analytical expressions for the case of two-qubit Bell-diagonal states, discussing the superadditivity of geometric correlations. As an illustration, we compare our results with the entropic correlations, discussing both their hierarchy and monotonicity properties. Moreover, we apply the geometric correlations to investigate the ground state of spin chains in the thermodynamic limit. In contrast to the entropic quantifiers, we show that the classical correlation is the only source of 1-norm geometric correlation that is able to signaling an infinite-order quantum phase transition.Comment: v2: published versio