We study the impact of entangling measurements on the efficiency of quantum measurement-based engines. We first demonstrate that for engines comprising many subsystems the efficiency can be enhanced through the implementation of entangling measurements. Then, we show that when the collective measurement yields the same local state for the subsystems as individual local measurements, the improvement is directly proportional to the amount of correlations among the subsystems. Finally, we present examples for two-level systems where this type of engine can operate at perfect efficiency yielding a finite amount of work in the limit of a large number of subsystems; we also discuss how to generalize this idea to larger systems.
We study the impact of entangling measurements on the efficiency of quantum measurement-based engines. We first demonstrate that for engines comprising many subsystems the efficiency can be enhanced through the implementation of entangling measurements. Then, we show that when the collective measurement yields the same local state for the subsystems as individual local measurements, the improvement is directly proportional to the amount of correlations among the subsystems. Finally, we present examples for two-level systems where this type of engine can operate at perfect efficiency yielding a finite amount of work in the limit of a large number of subsystems; we also discuss how to generalize this idea to larger systems.
Quantum measurement is inevitable to extract information from quantum systems. Exploring the power and limitation of quantum measurement has profound implications not only to foundational studies, but also to many practical applications. In most of these tasks, many identically prepared quantum systems are measured to acquire sufficient information. Although there is no entanglement or even no classical correlation among these identically systems, surprisingly, quantum collective measurements on them may extract more information than local measurements on individual systems, thereby leading to higher efficiency and precision in these tasks. Although the significance of collective measurements has been recognized for two decades, it is still very challenging to demonstrate their advantage in experiments. Here, we will introduce the first implementation of quantum collective measurement and it's applications on quantum orienting, reducing quantum backation of measurement, and so on.
In multi-parameter quantum metrology, the resource of entanglement can lead to an increase in efficiency of the estimation process. Entanglement can be used in the state preparation stage, or the measurement stage, or both, to harness this advantage; here we focus on the role of entangling measurements. Specifically, entangling or collective measurements over multiple identical copies of a probe state are known to be superior to measuring each probe individually, but the extent of this improvement is an open problem. It is also known that such entangling measurements, though resource-intensive, are required to attain the ultimate limits in multi-parameter quantum metrology and quantum information processing tasks. In this work we investigate the maximum precision improvement that collective quantum measurements can offer over individual measurements for estimating parameters of qudit states, calling this the 'collective quantum enhancement'. We show that, whereas the maximum enhancement can, in principle, be a factor of n for estimating n parameters, this bound is not tight for large n . Instead, our results prove an enhancement linear in dimension of the qudit is possible using collective measurements and lead us to conjecture that this is the maximum collective quantum enhancement in any local estimation scenario.
We propose a many-body quantum engine powered by the energy difference between the entangled ground state of the interacting system and local separable states. Performing local energy measurements on an interacting many-body system can produce excited states from which work can be extracted via local feedback operations. These measurements reveal the quantum vacuum fluctuations of the global ground state in the local basis and provide the energy required to run the engine. The reset part of the engine cycle is particularly simple: The interacting many-body system is coupled to a cold bath and allowed to relax to its entangled ground state. We illustrate our proposal on two types of many-body systems: A chain of coupled qubits and coupled harmonic oscillator networks. These models faithfully represent fermionic and bosonic excitations, respectively. In both cases, analytical results for the work output (average value and standard deviation) and efficiency of the engine are derived. We prove the efficiency is controlled by the ``local entanglement gap,'' the energy difference between the many-body ground state and the lowest-energy eigenstate of the local Hamiltonian. In all the examples analyzed in this work, for a large number of coupled subsystems, the average work output scales linearly or faster and dominates over fluctuations, while the efficiency limits to a constant. In the qubit chain case, we highlight the impact of a quantum phase transition on the engine's performance as work and efficiency sharply increase at the critical point. In the case of a one-dimensional oscillator chain, we show the efficiency approaches unity as the number of coupled oscillators increases, even at finite work output.
We discuss the role of non-ideal measurements within the context of measurement engines by contrasting examples of measurement engines which have the same work output but with varying amounts of entanglement. Accounting for the cost of resetting, correlating the engine to a pointer state and also the cost of cooling the pointer state, we show that for a given work output, thermally correlated engines can outperform corresponding entanglement engines. We also show that the optimal efficiency of the thermally correlated measurement engine is achieved with a higher temperature pointer than the pointer temperature of the optimal entanglement engine.
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.
We analyze a family of measures of general quantum correlations for composite systems, defined in terms of the bipartite entanglement necessarily created between systems and apparatuses during local measurements. For every entanglement monotone E, this operational correspondence provides a different measure QE of quantum correlations. Examples of such measures are the relative entropy of quantumness, the quantum deficit, and the negativity of quantumness. In general, we prove that any so-defined quantum correlation measure is always greater than (or equal to) the corresponding entanglement between the subsystems, ${Q}_{E}\ensuremath{\ge}E$, for arbitrary states of composite quantum systems. We analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the flow of correlations in iterated measurements, showing that general quantum correlations and entanglement can never decrease along von Neumann chains, and that genuine multipartite entanglement in the initial state of the observed system always gives rise to genuine multipartite entanglement among all subsystems and all measurement apparatuses at any level in the chain. Our results provide a comprehensive framework to understand and quantify general quantum correlations in multipartite states.