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arXiv:1606.03177 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Information thermodynamics for a multi-feedback process with time delay

Chulan Kwon, Jaegon Um, Hyunggyu Park

Published Jan 1, 2017• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate a measurement-feedback process of repeated operations with time delay. During a finite-time interval, measurement on the system is performed and the feedback protocol derived from the measurement outcome is applied with time delay. This protocol is maintained into the next interval until a new protocol from the next measurement is applied. Unlike a feedback process without delay, both memories associated with previous and present measurement outcomes are involved in the system dynamics, which naturally brings forth a joint system described by a system state and two memory states. The thermodynamic second law provides a lower bound for heat flow into a thermal reservoir by the (3-state) Shannon entropy change of the joint system. However, as the feedback protocol depends on memory states sequentially, we can deduce a tighter bound for heat flow by integrating out irrelevant memory states during dynamics. As a simple example, we consider the so-called cold damping feedback process where the velocity of a particle is measured and a dissipative feedback protocol is applied to decelerate the particle. We confirm that the heat flow is well above the tightest bound. We also examine the long-time limit of this feedback process, which turns out to exhibit an interesting instability transition as well as heating by controlling parameters such as measurement errors, time interval, protocol strength, and time delay length. We discuss the underlying mechanism for instability and heating, which might be unavoidable in reality.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/117/10011

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We investigate a measurement-feedback process of repeated operations with time delay. During a finite-time interval, measurement on the system is performed and the feedback protocol derived from the measurement outcome is applied with time delay. This protocol is maintained into the next interval until a new protocol from the next measurement is applied. Unlike a feedback process without delay, both memories associated with previous and present measurement outcomes are involved in the system dynamics, which naturally brings forth a joint system described by a system state and two memory states. The thermodynamic second law provides a lower bound for heat flow into a thermal reservoir by the (3-state) Shannon entropy change of the joint system. However, as the feedback protocol depends on memory states sequentially, we can deduce a tighter bound for heat flow by integrating out irrelevant memory states during dynamics. As a simple example, we consider the so-called cold damping feedback process where the velocity of a particle is measured and a dissipative feedback protocol is applied to decelerate the particle. We confirm that the heat flow is well above the tightest bound. We also examine the long-time limit of this feedback process, which turns out to exhibit an interesting instability transition as well as heating by controlling parameters such as measurement errors, time interval, protocol strength, and time delay length. We discuss the underlying mechanism for instability and heating, which might be unavoidable in reality.
We investigate feedback processes with measurement-induced protocols for particular tasks that drive systems in specified directions in state spaces. We focus on mutual information as a measure of correlation between system and memory, which has been known to play a crucial role for the second law of information thermodynamics. The performance of task is enhanced in the early stage of driving, along with the decrease of correlation and mutual information due to the passage from initial measurement. However, we find that the performance is suppressed if the time of driving exceeds a threshold, which we call feedback overshooting. We find that a type of correlation, anticorrelation, between system and memory is built up as a result of overshooting and gives rise to regaining mutual information. We examine the effect of overshooting in detail from two examples. We study the Szilard engine for the task of work extraction. We also study a recurrent feedback with finite time interval for the task to reduce the mean square distance of a colloid below the value by thermal fluctuation. We find that recurrent feedback is stable only for a moderate range of time intervals and the intensity of feedback protocol. We discuss the problem of divergence of mutual information for error-free measurement.
Adiabatic measurements, followed by feedback and erasure protocols, have often been considered as a model to embody Maxwell’s Demon paradox and to study the interplay between thermodynamics and information processing. Such studies have led to the conclusion, now widely accepted in the community, that Maxwell’s Demon and the second law of thermodynamics can peacefully coexist because any gain provided by the demon must be offset by the cost of performing the measurement and resetting the demon’s memory to its initial state. Statements of this kind are collectively referred to as second laws of information thermodynamics and have recently been extended to include quantum theoretical scenarios. However, previous studies in this direction have made several assumptions, particularly about the feedback process and the demon’s memory readout, and thus arrived at statements that are not universally applicable and whose range of validity is not clear. In this work, we fill this gap by precisely characterizing the full range of quantum feedback control and erasure protocols that are overall consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. This leads us to conclude that the second law of information thermodynamics is indeed universal : it must hold for any quantum feedback control and erasure protocol, regardless of the measurement process involved, as long as the protocol is overall compatible with thermodynamics. Our comprehensive analysis not only encompasses new scenarios but also retrieves previous ones, doing so with fewer assumptions. This simplification contributes to a clearer understanding of the theory.
We discuss the thermodynamic aspects of a single qubit based device, powered by weak quantum measurements, and feedback controlled by a quantum Maxwell's demon. We discuss both discrete and time-continuous operation of the measurement based device at finite temperature of the reservoir. In the discrete example where a demon acquires information via discrete weak measurements, we find that the thermodynamic variables including the heat exchanged, extractable work, and the entropy produced are completely determined by an information theoretic measure of the demon's perceived arrow of time. We also discuss a realistic time-continuous operation of the device where the feedback is applied after a sequence of weak measurements. In the time-continuous limit, we derive the exact finite-time statistics of work, heat and entropy changes along individual quantum trajectories of the quantum measurement process, and relate them to the demon's arrow of time.
We consider open quantum systems weakly coupled to thermal reservoirs and subjected to quantum feedback operations triggered with or without delay by monitored quantum jumps. We establish a thermodynamic description of such systems and analyze how the first and second law of thermodynamics are modified by the feedback. We apply our formalism to study the efficiency of a qubit subjected to a quantum feedback control and operating as a heat pump between two reservoirs. We also demonstrate that quantum feedbacks can be used to stabilize coherences in nonequilibrium stationary states which in some cases may even become pure quantum states.
Feedback uses past detection outcomes to dynamically modify a quantum system and is central to quantum control. These outcomes can be stored in a memory, defined as a stochastic function of past measurements. In this work, we investigate the main properties of a general memory function subject to arbitrary feedback dynamics. We show that the memory can be treated as a classical system coupled to the monitored quantum system, and that their joint evolution is described by a hybrid bipartite state. This framework allows us to introduce information-theoretic measures that quantify the correlations between the system and the memory. Furthermore, we develop a general framework to characterize the statistics of the memory -- such as moments, cumulants, and correlation functions -- which can be applied both to general feedback-control protocols and to monitored systems without feedback. As an application, we analyze feedback schemes based on detection events in a two-level system coupled to a thermal bath, focusing on protocols that stabilize either the excited-state population or Rabi oscillations against thermal dissipation.
Abstract The no-knowledge quantum feedback, introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett., 113, 020407 (2014), is a measurement-based feedback protocol for decoherence suppression in a quantum system coupled to noisy environment. By continuously measuring the environmental noise, without directly gathering any information about the system, the decoherence effect can be suppressed by feeding back quantum controls proportional to the measured signal. In the original work, the feedback control was assumed instantaneous, leading to perfect cancellation of noise backaction on the quantum system. However, the instantaneous feedback is difficult to achieve in practice, and close-loop feedback protocols are always associated with finite delayed time. Therefore, in this work, we consider the effects of the delay between the time at which the measurement signal is acquired and the time that such signal is fed back to the system. We investigate the problem with an example of a two-level system (qubit) coupled to a Markovian reservoir, via a Hermitian coupling operator, where a homodyne detection is used to measure the environmental noise. We numerically simulate quantum stochastic trajectories of the qubit and analyse their averaged dynamics. We find that the feedback control with time delay can either enhance or reduce the decoherence effects, depending on whether the delayed time is in-phase or out-of-phase with the unitary dynamics of the qubit system.