Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot body to the cold one), posing an apparent challenge to the second law of thermodynamics. Such an "anomalous" heat current was observed in a recent experiment (K. Micadei et al., arXiv:1711.03323), by employing two spin systems initially quantum correlated. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between this intriguing phenomenon and the initial conditions that allow it is not fully evident. Here, we address energy transfer in a wider perspective, identifying a nonclassical contribution that applies to the reversion of the heat flow as well as to more general forms of energy exchange. We derive three theorems that describe the energy transfer between two microscopic systems, for arbitrary initial bipartite states. Using these theorems, we obtain an analytical bound showing that certain type of quantum coherence can optimize such a process, outperforming incoherent states. This genuine quantum advantage is corroborated through a characterization of the energy transfer between two qubits. For this system, it is shown that a large enough amount of coherence is necessary and sufficient to revert the thermodynamic arrow of time. As a second crucial consequence of the presented theorems, we introduce a class of nonequilibrium states that only allow unidirectional energy flow. In this way, we broaden the set where the standard Clausius statement of the second law applies.

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. Our core result consists of constructive conditions for these transformations, which include the corresponding global unitary operation and the explicit states of all the systems involved. From this result we present various findings regarding the use of catalysts for cooling. First, we show that catalytic cooling is always possible if the dimension of the catalyst is sufficiently large. In particular, the cooling of a qubit using a hot qubit can be maximized with a catalyst as small as a three-level system. We also identify catalytic enhancements for tasks whose implementation is possible without a catalyst. For example, we find that in a multiqubit setup catalytic cooling based on a three-body interaction outperforms standard (non-catalytic) cooling using higher order interactions. Another advantage is illustrated in a thermometry scenario, where a qubit is employed to probe the temperature of the environment. In this case, we show that a catalyst allows to surpass the optimal temperature estimation attained only with the probe.

Correlations are a valuable resource for quantum information processing and quantum thermodynamics. However, the preparation of some correlated states can carry a substantial cost that should be compared against its value. We show that classical correlations can be catalytically exploited, which enables to mitigate heat and entropy dissipation in information erasure. These correlations are naturally generated by the erasure process, and thus can be considered free. Although we also show that maximum erasure with minimum dissipation and no correlations is theoretically possible, catalysts are always useful in practical erasure settings, where correlations are expected to take place.

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