Truly work-like work extraction

Understand

The work content of non-equilibrium systems in relation to a heat bath is often analyzed in terms of expectation values of an underlying random work variable.

• However, we show that when optimizing the expectation value of the extracted work, the resulting extraction process is subject to intrinsic fluctuations, uniquely determined by the Hamiltonian and the initial distribution of the system.
• These fluctuations can be of the same order as the expected work content per se, in which case the extracted energy is unpredictable, thus intuitively more heat-like than work-like.
• This raises the question of the `truly' work-like energy that can extracted.