From the Unknown to the Desired: Transforming Unknown Initial States in the Resource Theory of Work and Heat
Abstract
We study thermodynamic state transformations in the resource theory of work and heat when the initial quantum state is unknown. Moving beyond state-dependent protocols, we develop a universal framework in which a single transformation applies to all admissible input states. For mutually commuting conserved charges, we construct charge-conserving protocols whose transformation error, quantified by trace distance, decays super-polynomially with the number of system copies. As an application, we demonstrate universal work extraction: asymptotically optimal work can be extracted without microscopic knowledge of the initial state, with a super-polynomially small error. Our results show that thermodynamic state transformations remain achievable under limited prior information and establish a universal framework for resource-theoretic thermodynamics beyond the state-aware setting.
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BibTeX
@misc{biswas2026from,
title = {{From the Unknown to the Desired: Transforming Unknown Initial States in the Resource Theory of Work and Heat}},
author = {Tanmoy Biswas and Andreas Winter},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.09352},
eprint = {2609.09352},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09352},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - From the Unknown to the Desired: Transforming Unknown Initial States in the Resource Theory of Work and Heat
AU - Tanmoy Biswas
AU - Andreas Winter
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.09352
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09352
AB - We study thermodynamic state transformations in the resource theory of work and heat when the initial quantum state is unknown. Moving beyond state-dependent protocols, we develop a universal framework in which a single transformation applies to all admissible input states. For mutually commuting conserved charges, we construct charge-conserving protocols whose transformation error, quantified by trace distance, decays super-polynomially with the number of system copies. As an application, we demonstrate universal work extraction: asymptotically optimal work can be extracted without microscopic knowledge of the initial state, with a super-polynomially small error. Our results show that thermodynamic state transformations remain achievable under limited prior information and establish a universal framework for resource-theoretic thermodynamics beyond the state-aware setting.
ER -