A calorimetric measurement has recently been proposed as a promising technique to measure thermodynamic quantities in a dissipative superconducting qubit. These measurements rely on the fact that the system is projected into energy eigenstates whenever energy is exchanged with the environment. This requirement imposes a restriction on the class of systems that can be measured in this way. Here we extend the calorimetric protocol to the measurement of work in a driven quantum harmonic oscillator. We employ a scheme based on a two-level approximation that makes use of an experimentally accessible quantity and show how it relates to the work obtained through the standard two-measurement protocol. We find that the average work is well approximated in the underdamped regime for short driving times and, in the overdamped regime, for any driving time. However, this approximation fails for the variance and higher moments of work at finite temperatures. Furthermore, we show how to relate the work statistics obtained through this scheme to the work statistics given by the two-measurement protocol.
A calorimetric measurement has recently been proposed as a promising technique to measure thermodynamic quantities in a dissipative superconducting qubit. These measurements rely on the fact that the system is projected into energy eigenstates whenever energy is exchanged with the environment. This requirement imposes a restriction on the class of systems that can be measured in this way. Here we extend the calorimetric protocol to the measurement of work in a driven quantum harmonic oscillator. We employ a scheme based on a two-level approximation that makes use of an experimentally accessible quantity and show how it relates to the work obtained through the standard two-measurement protocol. We find that the average work is well approximated in the underdamped regime for short driving times and, in the overdamped regime, for any driving time. However, this approximation fails for the variance and higher moments of work at finite temperatures. Furthermore, we show how to relate the work statistics obtained through this scheme to the work statistics given by the two-measurement protocol.
A calorimetric measurement has recently been proposed as a promising technique to measure thermodynamic quantities in a dissipative superconducting qubit. These measurements rely on the fact that the system is projected into energy eigenstates whenever energy is exchanged with the environment. This provides a realization of the two measurement protocol in open quantum systems. However, the measurement scheme assumes that only the two lowest levels of the system can be occupied. The possibility of occupying higher levels becomes relevant when the system is driven for a sufficiently long time or the temperature is high enough. This causes a systematic error in the calorimetric measurement. We quantify this by considering a driven quantum harmonic oscillator in contact with an ideal heat bath for which we derive analytic expressions for the average work and its variance. We find that for the average work the two level approximation holds in the limit of small dissipation for short driving time and low temperature. In the limit of strong dissipation it will hold for any driving time, at low temperature. However the approximation is not valid for the variance and the higher moments of work at finite temperature.
Technological advances over the past few decades have made it possible to address quantum systems down to individual quanta of energy. Artificial atoms are now routinely fabricated and manipulated using solid-state technology. Exciting new applications are now within grasp, such as quantum heat engines, which have been theorised to achieve energy efficiencies not possible for their classical counterparts. Energy fluctuations are an inherent part of these devices and a detailed understanding of them is required. However, the proper theoretical framework under which such fluctuations are to be understood is still debated. In this thesis, we study energy fluctuations in open quantum systems at the level of individual runs of an experimental protocol. This work has been carried out in two parts. In the first part, we focus on calorimetric measurements – a promising new experimental protocol to continuously measure energy fluctuations of a qubit interacting with a thermal environment. Applying the protocol to more complex systems is not straightforward. Using a simple two-level approximation, we show that for some experimental parameters this protocol can be extended to a driven harmonic oscillator. Another aspect of the calorimetric protocol is that it can induce non-Markovian effects which affect how work and heat are defined. We quantify the degree of non-Markovianity induced by this measurement protocol, when applied to a qubit, based on a previously developed theoretical model. Importantly, we show that non-Markovianity does not necessarily decrease monotonically with the environment size. The attempt to extend the calorimetric protocol to general systems has led to the second part of this thesis. The calorimetric detection is a particular case of a continuously monitored system. However, other schemes exist that lead to different definitions of work and heat. Reconciling these approaches is not straightforward, as evidenced by the many work definitions present in the literature. The difficulty is centred at the fact that, in the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, energy is not always a well-defined quantity. Here, based on the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics, we put forward a general framework to remove this problem in a clear conceptual manner. In particular, we show that the classical definition of work for closed systems can be straightforwardly generalised to the quantum case. For an open system, we used the Bohmian conditional wave function which provides a stochastic state evolution for the open system. We show that this approach can lead to new insights regarding the role of entanglement in energy fluctuations and has the potential to provide a general and observer-independent framework of energy fluctuations in open quantum systems. The results presented in this thesis give a small contribution to the developing field of quantum thermodynamics.
To define the work performed on a driven quantum system in a physically sound way has turned out to be a truly non-trivial task, except in some special cases of limited applicability. This topic has been in a focus of intense research recently in the attempts to generalize the classical fluctuation relations into the quantum regime. Here we propose and demonstrate that a calorimetric measurement gives both a theoretical and experimental tool to test the Jarzynski equality (JE) and other fluctuation relations in a quantum system, and to analyze the distribution of dissipation in them, based on the very principle of conservation of energy. We focus on an experimentally feasible two-level system, a superconducting Cooper pair box subject to Landau-Zener interband transitions. Because of the small heat capacity and weak relaxation to the phonon bath, the calorimetric measurement on the electron gas (resistor) turns out to be a very feasible experimental method.
Recent developments in experimental methods allow for the study of thermodynamic properties of quantum systems. In quantum integrated circuits, quantum systems are elements in an electric circuit that can straightforwardly be coupled to other elements. This manipulability allows one to construct quantum heat engines, Maxwell demons etc. Quantum integrated circuits also are one of the main potential settings to realise a working quantum computer. Calorimetric measurements in integrated circuits serve as a promising technique to probe thermodynamic laws of the quantum regime and to study the inner workings of quantum devices. Due to this experimental accessibility, the theoretical study of open quantum systems in the context of quantum integrated circuits is highly relevant. Open quantum systems are typically small systems, e.g. qubits or oscillators, in contact with one or more reservoirs. The research on which this thesis is based can roughly be divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with the thermodynamics of a driven qubit in contact with a thermal bath. This system is the archetype of a quantum out-ofequilibrium system. In one case the qubit is strongly driven by a semiclassical driving field. Building on earlier works, the thermodynamic relations of the system are found by proving the equivalence with an easier to study qubit-oscillator system. In the other, case the qubit is driven by being in contact with two baths with a temperature gradient. The full generating function is derived in a proper approximative scheme and a fluctuation-dissipation relation is found. The second part focusses on a specific experimental scheme to perform calorimetric measurements. The scheme relies on coupling a quantum system to a finite reservoir and performing fast temperature measurements on the reservoir. Doing so allows one to infer energy changes in the reservoir and therefore to obtain the heat exchanged with the system. The dynamics of this system are modelled for weak system-reservoir coupling and concrete experimental predictions are made. In new work, the dynamics for a toy model of a system interacting with a finite reservoir are derived from first principles for a specific model. The first principle derivation matches with the earlier modelled dynamics in the weak coupling and allows to consider strong system-reservoir coupling as well.
We derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation for work in an open quantum system driven by a time-dependent protocol and subject to repeated projective energy measurements. The protocol is represented by a sequence of protocol quenches separated by finite-time Lindblad evolution, so that work is accumulated at the quenches while dissipation occurs between them. The resulting work statistics obey the Gallavotti-Cohen symmetry to give rise to the Crooks and Jarzynski fluctuation relations. By perturbing the dissipative dynamics and combining the Cramér--Rao inequality with the quantum Fisher information, we obtain VarW/[τ∂τ⟨W⟩]2≥1/F≥max(1/A,2/E), where ⟨W⟩ is the work expectation value, VarW is the variance of work, F is the Fisher information, A is the dynamical activity, E is the dimensionless entropy production, and τ is the switching time interval between quenches. The two thermodynamic bounds follow from two independent perturbations that generate the same response of the work statistics. We illustrate the relation for a dissipative two-level system under square-wave and sinusoidal driving and show that the tighter thermodynamic bound can depend on the driving protocol and switching time scale.
We study an interferometric method for measuring the statistics of work performed on a driven quantum system, which has been put forward recently (Dorner et al 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 230601, Mazzola et al 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 230602). This method allows the replacement of two projective measurements of the energy of the driven system with qubit tomography of an ancilla that is appropriately coupled to it. We highlight that this method could be employed to obtain the work statistics of closed as well as open driven system, even in the strongly dissipative regime. We then illustrate an implementation of the method in a circuit QED setup, which allows one to experimentally obtain the work statistics of a parametrically driven harmonic oscillator. Our implementation is an extension of the original method, in which two ancilla-qubits are employed and the work statistics are retrieved through two-qubit state tomography. Our simulations demonstrate the experimental feasibility.