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arXiv:2108.03289 · Physical Review A

Two-point measurement of entropy production from the outcomes of a single experiment with correlated photon pairs

G. H. Aguilar, Thais de Lima Silva, Thiago E. Guimarães, Rodrigo S. Piera, Lucas C. Céleri, Gabriel Teixeira Landi

Published Aug 17, 2022• 13 citations

Abstract

Fluctuation theorems are one of the pillars of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Broadly speaking, they concern the statistical distribution of quantities such as heat, work, or entropy production. Quantum experiments, however, usually can only assess these distributions indirectly, or reconstruct them a posteriori. In this Letter we report an experiment where the distribution of entropy production is obtained directly from the outcomes (clicks) of an optical experiment simulating the interaction between a two-level system and a thermal reservoir. The setup consists of entangled photon pairs, one of which is sent to an interferometer implementing a finite-temperature amplitude damping channel, and is designed so as to allow full access to the two-point measurement statistics of both system and reservoir. First, by measuring the entangled pair, we directly implement the two-point measurement scheme in the system, avoiding the destructive nature of photodetection. Second, each optical path of the interferometer is associated with a specific transition of the reservoir. Thus, by blocking all but one of the paths, we can measure the conditional entropy production, given a specific reservoir trajectory.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.106.l020201

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The thermodynamic behavior of Markovian open quantum systems can be described at the level of fluctuations by using continuous monitoring approaches. However, practical applications require assessing imperfect detection schemes, where the definition of main thermodynamic quantities becomes subtle and universal fluctuation relations are unknown. Here, we fill this gap by deriving a universal fluctuation relation that links thermodynamic entropy production and information-theoretical irreversibility along single trajectories in inefficient monitoring setups. This relation provides as a corollary an irreversibility estimator of dissipation using imperfect detection records that lower bounds the underlying entropy production at the level of visible trajectories. We illustrate our findings with a driven-dissipative two-level system following quantum jump trajectories and discuss the experimental applicability of our results for thermodynamic inference.

We study the quantum conditional entropy production, which quantifies the irreversibly conditioned on the coupling memory of the system. We prove that the quantum unconditional entropy production is less than the conditional one, where the latter has contribution from the informational nonequilibriumness. The mismatch, defined as the quantum dissipative information, pinpoints the distributive correlation established between the environment and the memory. Although the quantum unconditional entropy production can be zero, the conditional one is in general not, which is beyond the thermal equilibrium. Positive quantum dissipative information characterizes a potential work waste. We also prove the quantum fluctuation theorems related to the conditional entropy production, based on different two-point measurement schemes. The dissipative information itself also follows the quantum fluctuation theorem. We present examples based on the qubit collisional model and the qubit Maxwell's demon.