Under the influence of external environments, quantum systems can undergo various different processes, including decoherence and equilibration. We observe that macroscopic objects are both objective and thermal, thus leading to the expectation that both objectivity and thermalisation can peacefully coexist on the quantum regime too. Crucially, however, objectivity relies on distributed classical information that could conflict with thermalisation. Here, we examine the overlap between thermal and objective states. We find that in general, one cannot exist when the other is present. However, there are certain regimes where thermality and objectivity are more likely to coexist: in the high temperature limit, at the non-degenerate low temperature limit, and when the environment is large. This is consistent with our experiences that everyday-sized objects can be both thermal and objective.
Under the influence of external environments, quantum systems can undergo various different processes, including decoherence and equilibration. We observe that macroscopic objects are both objective and thermal, thus leading to the expectation that both objectivity and thermalisation can peacefully coexist on the quantum regime too. Crucially, however, objectivity relies on distributed classical information that could conflict with thermalisation. Here, we examine the overlap between thermal and objective states. We find that in general, one cannot exist when the other is present. However, there are certain regimes where thermality and objectivity are more likely to coexist: in the high temperature limit, at the non-degenerate low temperature limit, and when the environment is large. This is consistent with our experiences that everyday-sized objects can be both thermal and objective.
The rather new field of quantum thermodynamics intends to derive thermodynamics from quantum mechanics, as well as to study thermodynamical behavior of quantum systems. It turns out that, indeed, thermalization can be obtained even for very small quantum systems due to the interaction with an appropriate environment. The consideration of an ensemble, as in statistical mechanics, is not necessary. However, the total system - consisting of system and environment - in quantum thermodynamics is usually considered to be closed. In particular, there exists no interaction with an external observer. Since quantum measurements typically influence the measured system, one may wonder which influence such an observation will have in the quantum thermodynamical setting. In this thesis, we study this influence of measurements in quantum thermodynamical systems. It turns out that various concepts known from statistical mechanics arise from such a "quantum thermodynamics under observation", although they do not have any meaning in the isolated quantum thermodynamical setting. The model discussed in the first part consists of a two-level system coupled to a large spin environment, the magnetization of which is measured periodically. This leads to quasi-classical trajectories for the system and - as in statistical mechanics - thermalization and temperature only have a meaning in terms of an ensemble average or a long-time average. Calculating these averages, we prove the ergodicity of the system. Interestingly, the entropy of the obtained attractor state depends on the time between the measurements and can be shown to be connected with the subjective lack of knowledge of the observer. In case of optimal measurements, the ensemble averaged state of the system under periodic measurements equals the state of the system in the quantum thermodynamical model without measurements. Introducing a detuning between system and environment, we find that the system can be prepared in almost arbitrary thermal states due to the periodic measurements. Even the creation of inversion becomes possible. As shown in numerical simulations, our results, which were analytically obtained for large environments, are even applicable to describe the behavior of the system coupled to small environments consisting of only a few spins. Besides measurements of the environment, we also study direct projective measurements of the system, as well as measurements with finite duration, obtaining that the dynamics of the system is almost independent of the concrete realization of the measurements. In the second part of the thesis, we discuss the meaning of temperature fluctuations in quantum thermodynamical systems. In statistical mechanics, there exist different approaches to the problem of temperature fluctuations, which lead to the well-known temperature fluctuation formula. The nature and operational accessibility of these fluctuations, however, remains rather unclear. We argue that according to quantum thermodynamics a system relaxes into a quasi-stationary thermal state and therefore the temperature does not fluctuate. However, since temperature is not an observable, it can only be determined indirectly. For modular systems, we show that the fluctuations of the temperature estimate obtained from a single energy measurement, indeed, are given by the temperature fluctuation formula derived in statistical mechanics, but only within a certain temperature range. The validity range of this formula increases with increasing size of the system. Thus, one can conclude that these "temperature fluctuations" can be interpreted as representing a fundamental limit for the instantaneous determination of temperature.
We analyze decoherence and objectivization processes in spin-spin models for arbitrary spins without interactions between different spins in the environment. We first derive the most general analytic form of the decoherence factor in the measurement limit, where the interaction Hamiltonian dominates the rest. We then analyze thermal environments and derive exact, analytic formulas for both the decoherence factor and the state fidelity of postinteraction environment states, conditioned on different states of the system. This allows us to analyze the objectivization process of the state of the central spin during the interaction. We do so using so-called spectrum broadcast structures (SBS), which are specific multipartite quantum states encoding a certain operation notion of objectivity. We analyze analytically (for short times) and numerically how higher spin influences the efficiency of decoherence and objectivization processes. As expected, the higher the spin of the environment, the more efficient decoherence and objectivization become. This work is a generalization of previous studies, limited to spin-1/2 systems only, and we hope will be useful in future objectivity experiments.
Quantum mechanics describes the smallest systems, whilst classical physics describes macroscopic scales. However, the quantum-to-classical transition is a major unsolved problem. In this thesis, we develop further understanding of the transition through the concept of objectivity. The objects we perceive in our everyday world are objective: they exist regardless of observation, and their properties are independent of observers. This is because information about everyday objects came be found, for example, in the surrounding photon environment. Quantum Darwinism is a conceptual and theoretical framework that describes the emergence of objectivity. The “Darwinistic” part refers to how certain types of information tends to spread at the expense of others. The thesis addresses the quantitative description of objectivity, the dynamics of emergent objectivity, and the analysis of non-objectivity in experimental and biology-inspired systems. Firstly, we propose two new mathematical frameworks to describe objectivity, Strong Quantum Darwinism and invariant spectrum broadcast structure. Then we unite them with the pre-existing frameworks, Zurek's Quantum Darwinism and spectrum broadcast structure, by identifying their deep connections and differences. These conditions highlight how Each framework considers varying amounts of objectivity in the system and environments and together, they create a hierarchy of objectivity. We then analyse objectivity in a scenario where system-environment interactions are strong and non-Markovian, highlighting some practical differences between the Quantum Darwinism frameworks. Next, we describe the quantum channels that create objective states, leading us to discuss the contribution of non-Markovianity to the emergence of objectivity. Then, we introduce a witnessing scheme that simplifies the detection of non-objectivity to promote further experimental testing of Quantum Darwinism with larger environments. Finally, we examine the contribution of quantum coherence and non-objectivity to the performance of a biological-inspired quantum magnetic sensor that operates close to the quantum-classical boundary. We find that the sensor operates in a non-objective regime, and that quantum coherence is necessary for the sensor's performance. The quantum-to-classical transition is a longstanding open question: these findings deepen our knowledge of how objectivity emerges, and contributes to and the types of interactions that keep systems quantum, which is relevant for understanding quantum biological systems and exploiting environment effects in novel quantum technologies. While the quantum-to-classical transition remains unsolved, Quantum Darwinism and its frameworks contribute to the understanding of emergent objectivity and have much potential to further explore aspects of the transition within the structure of quantum mechanics.
Abstract We examine how the ability of a system to redundantly proliferate relevant information about its pointer states is affected when it is coupled to multiple baths. To this end, we consider a system in contact with two baths: one—termed the accessible environment —which, on its own, induces a pure dephasing mechanism on the state of the system and satisfies the conditions for classical objectivity to be established. The second environment, which we dub as inaccessible, affects the system in two physically relevant ways. Firstly, we consider an interaction that commutes with the Hamiltonian describing the interaction between system and accessible bath. It thus also gives rise to dephasing of the system, albeit on different time scales. Secondly, we consider a thermalising interaction, which does not commute with the system-accessible environment Hamiltonian. While the former still allows the system to redundantly encode its state into the accessible environment, the latter degrades the correlations, eventually destroying them in the long-time limit, and thus leads to a loss of the conditions necessary for classical objectivity to be established. This sheds light on the role that commutativity between the various system-bath interaction terms plays when establishing the conditions for classical objectivity to be supported.
The birth of objective properties from the subjective quantum world has been one of the key questions in the quantum-to-classical transition. Based on recent results in the field, we study it in a quantum mechanical model of a boson-boson interaction—quantum Brownian motion. Using various simplifications, we prove a formation for thermal environments of, so called, spectrum broadcast structures, responsible for perceived objectivity. In the quantum measurement limit we prove that this structure is always formed, providing the characteristic timescales. Including self-Hamiltonians of the environment, we show the exponential scaling of the effect with the size of the environment. Finally, in the full model we numerically study the influence of squeezing in the initial state of the environment, showing broader regions of formation than for non-squeezed thermal states.
Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories, correctly predicting huge class of physical phenomena. Ironically, in spite of all its successes, there is a notorious problem: how does Nature create a ''bridge'' from fragile quanta to the robust, objective world of everyday experience? It is now commonly accepted that the most promising approach is the Decoherence Theory, based on the system-environment paradigm. To explain the observed redundancy and objectivity of information in the classical realm, Zurek proposed to divide the environment into independent fractions and argued that each of them carries a nearly complete classical information about the system. This Quantum Darwinism model has nevertheless some serious drawbacks: i) the entropic information redundancy is motivated by a priori purely classical reasoning; ii) there is no answer to the basic question: what physical process makes the transition from quantum description to classical objectivity possible? Here we prove that the necessary and sufficient condition for objective existence of a state is the spectrum broadcasting process, which, in particular, implies Quantum Darwinism. We first show it in general, using multiple environments paradigm, a suitable definition of objectivity, and Bohr's notion of non-disturbance, and then on the emblematic example for Decoherence Theory: a dielectric sphere illuminated by photons. We also apply Perron-Frobenius Theorem to show a faithful, ''decoherence-free'' form of broadcasting. We suggest that the spectrum broadcasting might be one of the foundational properties of Nature, which opens a ''window'' for life processes.