  Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the
nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one
thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an
experimenter has very precise control of the system and heat bath. Here we show
that these multitude of laws can be saturated using two very simple operations:
changing the energy levels of the system and thermalizing over any two system
energy levels. Using these two operations, one can distill the optimal amount
of work from a system, as well as perform the reverse formation process. Even
more surprisingly, using only these two operations and one ancilla qubit in a
thermal state, one can transform any state into any other state allowable by
the second laws. We thus have the remarkable result that the second laws hold
for fine-grained manipulation of system and bath, but can be achieved using
very coarse control. This brings the full array of thermal operations into a
regime accessible by experiment, and establishes the physical relevance of
these second laws.
