Energetics of quantum correlations

We consider a photo-Carnot engine that consists of a single-mode radiation field in an optical cavity. One the heat reservoirs is made of a beam of thermally entangled pairs of two-level atoms that interact resonantly with the cavity. We express the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine in terms of the quantum discord of the atomic pair and find that it can exceed its classical value. Our results show that useful work can be extracted from quantum correlations, indicating that the latter are a valuable resource in quantum thermodynamics.