The history of thermodynamics is intimately linked to the development of heat engines and the production of mechanical work. Determining the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from a given system is thus a central problem of classical thermodynamics and, in more recent years, of quantum thermodynamics. In quantum systems, coherence, which is related to linear superposition of states, is expected to enhance the work capacity. Now Zhibo Niu and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China have experimentally verified this theoretical prediction, hence confirming that quantum coherence is a potentially useful resource for nanodevice engineering [1] (Fig. 1).
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