Catalytic transformations with finite-size environments: applications to cooling and thermometry

Understand

The laws of thermodynamics are usually formulated under the assumption of infinitely large environments.

• While this idealization facilitates theoretical treatments, real physical systems are always finite and their interaction range is limited.
• These constraints have consequences for important tasks such as cooling, not directly captured by the second law of thermodynamics.
• Here, we study catalytic transformations that cannot be achieved when a system exclusively interacts with a finite environment.