Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 227, 285–300 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2018-00093-9

Regular Article

Entropy production and fluctuations in a Maxwell’s refrigerator with squeezing

¹ Departamento de Física Atómica, Molecular y Nuclear and GISC, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
² Institute for Cross-disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (UIB-CSIC), Campus Universitat de les Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain

^a e-mail: gmanzano@ucm.es

Received: 13 October 2017
Received in final form: 21 November 2017
Published online: 28 September 2018

Abstract

Clarifying the impact of quantumness in the operation and properties of thermal machines represents a major challenge. Here we envisage a toy model acting either as an information-driven fridge or as heat-powered information eraser in which coherences can be naturally introduced in by means of squeezed thermal reservoirs. We study the validity of the transient entropy production fluctuation theorem in the model with and without squeezing as well as its decomposition into adiabatic and non-adiabatic contributions. Squeezing modifies fluctuations and introduces extra mechanisms of entropy exchange. This leads to enhancements in the cooling performance of the refrigerator, and challenging Landauer’s bound in the setup.