We derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation for general open quantum dynamics, described by a joint unitary evolution on a composite system comprising a system and an environment. By measuring the environmental state after the system-environment interaction, we bound the counting observables in the environment by the survival activity, which reduces to the dynamical activity in classical Markov processes. Remarkably, the relation derived herein holds for general open quantum systems with any counting observable and any initial state. Therefore, our relation is satisfied for classical Markov processes with arbitrary time-dependent transition rates and initial states. We apply our relation to continuous measurement and the quantum walk to find that the quantum nature of the system can enhance the precision. Moreover, we can make the lower bound arbitrarily small by employing appropriate continuous measurement.
We study an information-theoretic measure of uncertainty for quantum systems. It is the Shannon information I of the phase-space probability distribution 〈z\ensuremath{\Vert}\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\Vert}z〉, where \ensuremath{\Vert}z〉 are coherent states and \ensuremath{\rho} is the density matrix. As shown by Lieb I\ensuremath{\ge}1, and this bound represents a strengthened version of the uncertainty principle. For a harmonic oscillator in a thermal state, I coincides with von Neumann entropy, -Tr(\ensuremath{\rho}ln\ensuremath{\rho}), in the high-temperature regime, but unlike entropy, it is nonzero (and equal to the Lieb bound) at zero temperature. It therefore supplies a nontrivial measure of uncertainty due to both quantum and thermal fluctuations. We study I as a function of time for a class of nonequilibrium quantum systems consisting of a distinguished system coupled to a heat bath. We derive an evolution equation for I. For the harmonic oscillator, in the Fokker-Planck regime, we show that I increases monotonically, if the width of the coherent states is chosen to be the same as the width of the harmonic oscillator ground state. For other choices of the width, and for more general Hamiltonians, I settles down to a monotonic increase in the long run, but may suffer an initial decrease for certain initial states that undergo ``reassembly'' (the opposite of quantum spreading). Our main result is to prove, for linear systems, that I at each moment of time has a lower bound
Itmin, over all possible initial states.This bound is a generalization of the uncertainty principle to include thermal fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems, and represents the least amount of uncertainty the system must suffer after evolution in the presence of an environment for time t.
Itmin is an envelope, equal for each time t, to the time evolution of I for a certain initial state, which we calculate to be a nonminimal Gaussian.
Itmin coincides with the Lieb bound in the absence of an environment, and is related to von Neumann entropy in the long-time limit. The form of
Itmin indicates that the thermal fluctuations become comparable with the quantum fluctuations on a time scale equal to the decoherence time scale, in agreement with earlier work of Hu and Zhang. Our results are also related to those of Zurek, Habib, and Paz, who looked for the set of initial states generating the least amount of von Neumann entropy after a fixed period of nonunitary evolution.
We use quantum estimation theory to derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation in Markovian open quantum systems, which bounds the fluctuation of continuous measurements. The derived quantum thermodynamic uncertainty relation holds for arbitrary continuous measurements satisfying a scaling condition. We derive two relations; the first relation bounds the fluctuation by the dynamical activity and the second one does so by the entropy production. We apply our bounds to a two-level atom driven by a laser field and a three-level quantum thermal machine with jump and diffusion measurements. Our result shows that there exists a universal bound upon the fluctuations, regardless of continuous measurements.
For classic systems, the thermodynamic uncertainty relation (TUR) states that the fluctuations of a current have a lower bound in terms of the entropy production. Some TURs are rooted in information theory, particularly derived from relations between observations (mean and variance) and dissimilarities, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence, which plays the role of entropy production in stochastic thermodynamics. We generalize this idea for quantum systems, where we find a lower bound for the uncertainty of quantum observables given in terms of the quantum relative entropy. We apply the result to obtain a quantum thermodynamic uncertainty relation in terms of the quantum entropy production, valid for arbitrary dynamics and nonthermal environments.
Within the framework of thermo-field-dynamics, we define the reduced probability densities, and investigate the sum of information-theoretic entropies in quantum mechanics associated with the measurements of the position and momentum of a particle surrounded by the thermal environment. It is found that this quantity cannot be made arbitrarily small but has a universal lower bound dependent on the temperature. We develop the finite-temperature variational technique for the reduced system, and show that this relation, termed the thermal information-entropic uncertainty relation, is exactly saturated by the thermal coherent state. We also show that the Heisenberg uncertainty relation at finite temperature can be derived from this relation.
Exchange of information between a quantum system and its surrounding environment plays a fundamental role in the study of the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here we discuss the role of the information exchange in the non-Markovian behavior of dynamical quantum processes following the decoherence approach, where we consider a quantum system that is initially correlated with its measurement apparatus, which in turn interacts with the environment. We introduce a way of looking at the information exchange between the system and environment using the quantum loss, which is shown to be closely related to the measure of non-Markovianity based on the quantum mutual information. We also extend the results of Fanchini et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 210402 (2014)] in several directions, providing a more detailed investigation of the use of the accessible information for quantifying the backflow of information from the environment to the system. Moreover, we reveal a clear conceptual relation between the entanglement- and mutual-information-based measures of non-Markovianity in terms of the quantum loss and accessible information. We compare different ways of studying the information flow in two theoretical examples. We also present experimental results on the investigation of the quantum loss and accessible information for a two-level system undergoing a zero temperature amplitude damping process. We use an optical approach that allows full access to the state of the environment.