Measurements and feedback are essential in the control of any device operating at the quantum scale and exploiting the features of quantum physics. As the number of quantum components grows, it becomes imperative to consider the energetic expense of such elementary operations. Here, we derive energy requirements for general quantum measurement, extending previous models and obtaining stronger bounds in relevant situations, and then study two important classes of measurements in detail. One is the projective measurement, where we obtain the exact cost rather than a lower bound, and the other is the so-called inefficient measurement, in which we explicitly show that energy extraction is possible. As applications, we derive the energy-precision trade-off in quantum Zeno stabilisation schemes and the exact energy expense for quantum error correction. Our results constitute fundamental energetic limitations against which to benchmark implementations of future quantum devices as they grow in complexity.
Measurements and feedback are essential in the control of any device operating at the quantum scale and exploiting the features of quantum physics. As the number of quantum components grows, it becomes imperative to consider the energetic expense of such elementary operations. Here, we derive energy requirements for general quantum measurement, extending previous models and obtaining stronger bounds in relevant situations, and then study two important classes of measurements in detail. One is the projective measurement, where we obtain the exact cost rather than a lower bound, and the other is the so-called inefficient measurement, in which we explicitly show that energy extraction is possible. As applications, we derive the energy-precision trade-off in quantum Zeno stabilisation schemes and the exact energy expense for quantum error correction. Our results constitute fundamental energetic limitations against which to benchmark implementations of future quantum devices as they grow in complexity.
Quantum measurements are an essential ingredient in numerous protocols and quantum technologies.As a characteristic trait, quantum measurements are typically employed a vast number of times to allow for higher accuracy, better control or just increased performance of quantum devices.In this thesis, we pursue a resource-theoretic approach to quantum measurements, aiming at the quantification of their energetic cost.While there exists a plethora of literature on this topic already, we develop a general framework that allows us to unify several of these previous results and to improve them systematically.We highlight an issue common to most of these previous works, where a notion of quantum measurement is employed which is not detailed enough to be applicable to several realistic and important applications for quantum measurement.More concretely, previous work typically involves a state transformation concept, similar to thermodynamic considerations, where only a specific initial and final state of the measured system are specified to characterise the process.For real applications however, quantum measurement devices are typically required to perform the measurement for all possible initial states of the measured system.In this thesis we analyse this requirement and obtain as a consequence much stronger energy constraints on quantum measurements than previously known.For particular forms of measurement, namely dephasing channels, projective quantum instruments, and projection valued measures, we even determine the exact energy costs in contrast to the common lower bound statements in previous literature.Remarkably, the exact cost of projective quantum instruments constitutes the strongest energy constraint on quantum measurement known so far.We demonstrate the implications of these results in two important applications, where quantum measurements play a significant role, namely quantum Zeno stabilisation and quantum error correction.The exact energetic requirements we compute for these two protocols show that any restriction on the amount of available energy immediately places fundamental constraints on the performance of these protocols.
Quantifying the energetic cost of implementing quantum operations is essential for assessing the efficiency and scalability of quantum sensing and information-processing technologies. Here, we introduce a framework for analysing the interplay between complexity and energy cost of quantum processes. In particular, we apply our framework to a sequential quantum phase estimation protocol, where a phase of physical significance is encoded in a quantum channel. The channel is applied to a probe state repeatedly until the probe is measured and the outcome leads to an estimate on the phase. We establish a trade-off relation between the total energy cost of the protocol and the number of times the channel is applied (complexity), while reaching a desired estimation precision. A sweet spot is located where the two quantities are co-optimised. The principles of our analysis can be adapted to benchmark the energetic requirements in other quantum protocols and devices.
We show that it is impossible to perform ideal projective measurements on quantum systems using finite resources. We identify three fundamental features of ideal projective measurements and show that when limited by finite resources only one of these features can be salvaged. Our framework is general enough to accommodate any system and measuring device (pointer) models, but for illustration we use an explicit model of an N -particle pointer. For a pointer that perfectly reproduces the statistics of the system, we provide tight analytic expressions for the energy cost of performing the measurement. This cost may be broken down into two parts. First, the cost of preparing the pointer in a suitable state, and second, the cost of a global interaction between the system and pointer in order to correlate them. Our results show that, even under the assumption that the interaction can be controlled perfectly, achieving perfect correlation is infinitely expensive. We provide protocols for achieving optimal correlation given finite resources for the most general system and pointer Hamiltonians, phrasing our results as fundamental bounds in terms of the dimensions of these systems.
Quantum error correction acts as an entropy pump, transferring noise-induced uncertainty from a protected quantum system into syndrome information stored in an auxiliary memory. Repeated operation requires this memory to be cleared which unavoidably contributes to the energetic cost of error correction. Here, we characterise this contribution for subspace quantum error-correcting codes and identify how it depends on the joint structure of the code, the noise, and the representation of the retained syndrome information. Starting from the Knill--Laflamme conditions, we construct an effective syndrome state whose von Neumann entropy sets a lower bound on the ideal work required to maintain a reusable syndrome register. Projective syndrome readout generally generates additional entropy, and we quantify the resulting gap through measurement inefficiency. We then specialise to stabiliser codes under independent local Pauli noise and analyse two classical levels of syndrome representation. At the level of abstract error labels, degeneracies among single-qubit errors reduce the leading-order entropy of processed recovery labels. At the parity-check level, lower-weight checks reduce the marginal entropy generated by individual measurement outcomes in the low-noise regime. We identify the additional burden associated with retaining and separately erasing these outcomes as a bit-level inefficiency, and illustrate both costs for the five-qubit, Steane, generalised Shor, and rotated surface codes. Our results establish a hierarchy of syndrome-memory energetic costs and identify the code, noise, and measurement structures that control the ideal thermodynamic burden of subspace quantum error correction.
A genuine feature of projective quantum measurements is that they inevitably alter the mean energy of the observed system if the measured quantity does not commute with the Hamiltonian. Compared to the classical case, Jacobs proved that this additional energetic cost leads to a stronger bound on the work extractable after a single measurement from a system initially in thermal equilibrium (2009 Phys. Rev. A 80 012322 ). Here, we extend this bound to a large class of feedback-driven quantum engines operating periodically and in finite time. The bound thus implies a natural definition for the efficiency of information to work conversion in such devices. For a simple model consisting of a laser-driven two-level system, we maximize the efficiency with respect to the observable whose measurement is used to control the feedback operations. We find that the optimal observable typically does not commute with the Hamiltonian and hence would not be available in a classical two level system. This result reveals that periodic feedback engines operating in the quantum realm can exploit quantum coherences to enhance efficiency.
Abstract While recent breakthroughs in quantum computing promise the nascence of the quantum information age, quantum states remain delicate to control. Moreover, the required energy budget for large scale quantum applications has only sparely been considered. Addressing either of these issues necessitates a careful study of the most energetically efficient implementation of elementary quantum operations. In the present analysis, we show that this optimal control problem can be solved within the powerful framework of quantum speed limits. To this end, we derive state-independent lower bounds on the energetic cost, from which we find the universally optimal implementation of unitary quantum gates, for both single and N -qubit operations.