An attempt toward the operational formulation of quantum thermodynamics ismade by employing the recently proposed operations forming positiveoperator-valued measures for generating thermodynamic processes. The quantityof heat as well as the von Neumann entropy monotonically increases under theoperations. The fixed point analysis shows that repeated applications of theseoperations to a given system transform from its pure ground state at zerotemperature to the completely random state in the high temperature limit withintermediate states being generically out of equilibrium. It is shown that theClausius inequality can be violated along the processes, in general. Abipartite spin-1/2 system is analyzed as an explicit example.
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