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arXiv:1902.02357 · Physical Review Letters

Fundamental Limitations to Local Energy Extraction in Quantum Systems

Alvaro Martin Alhambra, Georgios Styliaris, Nayeli A. Rodríguez-Briones, Jamie Sikora, Eduardo Martín-Martínez

Published Nov 5, 2019• 39 citations
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Abstract

We examine when it is possible to locally extract energy from a bipartite quantum system in the presence of strong coupling and entanglement, a task which is expected to be restricted by entanglement in the low-energy eigenstates. We fully characterize this distinct notion of "passivity" by finding necessary and sufficient conditions for such extraction to be impossible, using techniques from semidefinite programing. This is the first time in which such techniques are used in the context of energy extraction, which opens a way of exploring further kinds of passivity in quantum thermodynamics. We also significantly strengthen a previous result of Frey et al., by showing a physically relevant quantitative bound on the threshold temperature at which this passivity appears. Furthermore, we show how this no-go result also holds for thermal states in the thermodynamic limit, provided that the spatial correlations decay sufficiently fast, and we give numerical examples.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.123.190601

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We examine when it is possible to locally extract energy from a bipartite quantum system in the presence of strong coupling and entanglement, a task which is expected to be restricted by entanglement in the low-energy eigenstates. We fully characterize this distinct notion of "passivity" by finding necessary and sufficient conditions for such extraction to be impossible, using techniques from semidefinite programing. This is the first time in which such techniques are used in the context of energy extraction, which opens a way of exploring further kinds of passivity in quantum thermodynamics. We also significantly strengthen a previous result of Frey et al., by showing a physically relevant quantitative bound on the threshold temperature at which this passivity appears. Furthermore, we show how this no-go result also holds for thermal states in the thermodynamic limit, provided that the spatial correlations decay sufficiently fast, and we give numerical examples.
Passive states of quantum systems are states from which no system energy can be extracted by any cyclic (unitary) process. Gibbs states of all temperatures are passive. Strong local (SL) passive states are defined to allow any general quantum operation, but the operation is required to be local, being applied only to a specific subsystem. Any mixture of eigenstates in a system-dependent neighborhood of a nondegenerate entangled ground state is found to be SL passive. In particular, Gibbs states are SL passive with respect to a subsystem only at or below a critical system-dependent temperature. SL passivity is associated in many-body systems with the presence of ground state entanglement in a way suggestive of collective quantum phenomena such as quantum phase transitions, superconductivity, and the quantum Hall effect. The presence of SL passivity is detailed for some simple spin systems where it is found that SL passivity is neither confined to systems of only a few particles nor limited to the near vicinity of the ground state.
Quantum thermodynamics and quantum entanglement represent two pivotal quantum resource theories with significant relevance in quantum information science. Despite their importance, the intricate relationship between these two theories is still not fully understood. Here, we investigate the interplay between entanglement and thermodynamics, particularly in the context of local cooling processes. We introduce and develop the framework of Gibbs-preserving local operations and classical communication. Within this framework, we explore strategies enabling remote parties to effectively cool their local systems to the ground state. Our analysis is centered on scenarios where only a single copy of a quantum state is accessible, with the ideal performance defined by the highest possible fidelity to the ground state achievable under these constraints. We focus on systems with fully degenerate local Hamiltonians, where local cooling aligns with the extraction of local purity. In this context, we establish a powerful link between the efficiency of local purity extraction and the degree of entanglement present in the system, a concept we define as purity-entanglement complementarity . Moreover, we demonstrate that in many pertinent scenarios, the optimal performance can be precisely determined through semidefinite programming techniques. Our findings open doors to various practical applications, including techniques for entanglement detection and estimation. We demonstrate this by evaluating the amount of entanglement for a class of bound entangled states.
Quantum states that can yield work in a cyclical Hamiltonian process form one of the primary resources in the context of quantum thermodynamics. Conversely, states whose average energy cannot be lowered by unitary transformations are called passive. However, while work may be extracted from non-passive states using arbitrary unitaries, the latter may be hard to realize in practice. It is therefore pertinent to consider the passivity of states under restricted classes of operations that can be feasibly implemented. Here, we ask how restrictive the class of Gaussian unitaries is for the task of work extraction. We investigate the notion of Gaussian passivity, that is, we present necessary and sufficient criteria identifying all states whose energy cannot be lowered by Gaussian unitaries. For all other states we give a prescription for the Gaussian operations that extract the maximal amount of energy. Finally, we show that the gap between passivity and Gaussian passivity is maximal, i.e., Gaussian-passive states may still have a maximal amount of energy that is extractable by arbitrary unitaries, even under entropy constraints.
Strong local passivity is a property of multipartite quantum systems from which it is impossible to extract energy locally. Surprisingly, if the strong local passive state displays entanglement, it could be possible to locally activate energy density by adding classical communication between different partitions of the system, through so-called "quantum energy teleportation" protocols. Here, we report both the first experimental observation of local activation of energy density on an entangled state and the first realization of a quantum energy teleportation protocol using nuclear magnetic resonance on a bipartite quantum system.
We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body systems. Specifically, we study protocols of work extraction that employ a many-body system as a working medium whose evolution can be driven by tuning the on-site Hamiltonian terms. This provides a restricted set of thermodynamic operations, giving rise to alternative bounds for the performance of engines. Our findings show that those limitations in control render it, in general, impossible to reach Carnot efficiency; in its extreme ramification it can even forbid to reach a finite efficiency or finite work per particle. We focus on the one-dimensional Ising model in the thermodynamic limit as a case study. We show that in the limit of strong interactions the ferromagnetic case becomes useless for work extraction, while the antiferromagnetic case improves its performance with the strength of the couplings, reaching Carnot in the limit of arbitrary strong interactions. Our results provide a promising connection between the study of quantum control and thermodynamics and introduce a more realistic set of physical operations well suited to capture current experimental scenarios.
Energy in a multipartite quantum system appears from an operational perspective to be distributed to some extent non-locally because of correlations extant among the system's components. This non-locality allows users to transfer, in effect, locally accessible energy between sites of different system components by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Quantum energy teleportation is a three-step LOCC protocol, accomplished without an external energy carrier, for effectively transferring energy between two physically separated, but correlated, sites. We apply this LOCC teleportation protocol to a model Heisenberg spin particle pair initially in a quantum thermal Gibbs state, making temperature an explicit parameter. We find in this setting that energy teleportation is possible at any temperature, even at temperatures above the threshold where the particles' entanglement vanishes. This shows for Gibbs spin states that entanglement is not fundamentally necessary for energy teleportation; correlation other than entanglement can suffice. Dissonance-quantum correlation in separable states-is in this regard shown to be a quantum resource for energy teleportation, more dissonance being consistently associated with greater energy yield. We compare energy teleportation from particle A to B in Gibbs states with direct local energy extraction by a general quantum operation on B and find a temperature threshold below which energy extraction by a local operation is impossible. This threshold delineates essentially two regimes: a high temperature regime where entanglement vanishes and the teleportation generated by other quantum correlations yields only vanishingly little energy relative to local extraction and a second low-temperature teleportation regime where energy is available at B only by teleportation.