Dissipation, correlation and lags in heat engines

By modelling heat engines as driven multi-partite system we show that their dissipation can be expressed in terms of the lag (relative entropy) between the perturbed state of each partition and their equilibrium state, and the correlations that build up among the partitions. We show that the non-negativity of the overall dissipation implies Carnot formulation of the second law. We illustrate the rich interplay between correlations and lags with a two-qubit device driven by a quantum gate.