We analyze the precision of generic currents in a multiterminal quantum-transport setting. Employing scattering theory, we show that the precision of such currents is limited by a function of the particle-current noise that can be interpreted as the activity in the classical limit. We thereby establish a kinetic uncertainty relation for quantum transport. In the full quantum limit, we find precision bounds with modified activity constraints depending on whether the system is fermionic or bosonic. We expect these bounds to be suitable as guidelines for any transport process aiming at high precision.
We analyze the precision of generic currents in a multiterminal quantum-transport setting. Employing scattering theory, we show that the precision of such currents is limited by a function of the particle-current noise that can be interpreted as the activity in the classical limit. We thereby establish a kinetic uncertainty relation for quantum transport. In the full quantum limit, we find precision bounds with modified activity constraints depending on whether the system is fermionic or bosonic. We expect these bounds to be suitable as guidelines for any transport process aiming at high precision.
Abstract We study the fluctuations of generic currents in multi-terminal, multi-channel coherent quantum transport settings. In the quantum regime, these fluctuations and the resulting precision differ strongly depending on whether the device is of fermionic or bosonic nature. Using scattering theory, we show that the precision is bounded by constraints set by the entropy production and by the activity in the spirit of thermodynamic or kinetic uncertainty relations, valid for fermionic and bosonic quantum systems also in the absence of time-reversal symmetry. Furthermore, we derive a combined thermodynamic kinetic uncertainty relation, which is tight over a wide range of parameters and can hence predict the reachable precision of a device. Since these constraints can be expressed in terms of observables accessible in transport measurements, such as currents and bandwidth, we foresee that the tight thermodynamic kinetic uncertainty-like bounds are also useful as an inference tool: they can be exploited to estimate entropy production from transport observables, such as the charge current and its noise, which are more easily accessible in experiment.
Kinetic uncertainty relations bound current precision of stochastic processes by dynamical activity. The extension of these bounds to quantum systems has been impeded by coherence, strong system-reservoir coupling, and the subtlety of defining dynamical activity in the quantum regime. Here, we introduce a partial dynamical activity through the quantum Fisher information associated with the rescaling of the system-reservoir coupling and show that it bounds current precision via a universal susceptibility-kinetic uncertainty relation. The general validity of this relation for any open quantum system is guaranteed by the natural contribution of a susceptibility term, which is experimentally accessible by tuning the system-reservoir coupling strength. We show how the partial dynamical activity encompasses previous definitions of activity in the weak-coupling Markovian limit and that it provides an information-geometric interpretation of correlator-based activities. We illustrate the tight constraint on precision that our bound provides with the example of steady-state transport through a double quantum dot, where quantum effects invalidate previously developed kinetic uncertainty relations. We expect our bound to provide a powerful tool for optimizing precision in arbitrary quantum systems.
The kinetic uncertainty relation (KUR) constrains fluctuations of individual currents in classical nonequilibrium systems in terms of the dynamical activity, which quantifies the average number of transitions per unit of time. Here, we derive a multi-current KUR (MKUR) establishing the precision limit for multiple currents generated in classical stochastic processes in the nonequilibrium steady state. We then apply our theory to identify quantum devices whose correlated current fluctuations surpass this classical limit by comparing the quantum system to a classical emulator with the same average currents in the steady state. In this way, violations of the emulator's MKUR have a clear physical meaning, i.e., that the quantum-coherent evolution reduces joint current fluctuations below what is possible for a classical Markovian system with the same energy-level structure and incoherent resources. Since the MKUR incorporates correlations between currents, its violation pinpoints nonclassical fluctuations in parameter regimes where the single-current KUR is satisfied. We illustrate the essential and complementary role of these bounds for characterizing joint current precision with two examples: a coherently driven two-level system and an experimentally motivated model of a three-level heat engine subject to parasitic environmental couplings.
Kinetic uncertainty relations (KURs) set fundamental limits on the precision of nonequilibrium transport by bounding the signal-to-noise ratio of currents in terms of the dynamical activity, a quantity that counts exchange events between a system and its reservoirs. This framework is well established in the weak-coupling regime, where transport occurs via well-defined, particlelike tunneling processes. At strong coupling, however, quantum coherence challenges both the validity of standard KURs and the notion of activity itself. In this Letter, we introduce a generalized definition of dynamical activity valid at arbitrary system-reservoir coupling, and show that it leads to a breakdown of standard KURs at strong coupling. Building on this result, we derive and prove a novel uncertainty relation, denoted quantum KUR (QKUR), which provides a genuine quantum extension of KUR, accounting for intrinsic quantum coherent contributions of the generalized activity. We demonstrate that the generalized activity reduces to the standard master-equation definition in the weak-coupling regime for generic systems of N coupled quantum dots described by a quadratic Hamiltonian, and analyze the resulting QKUR bound in paradigmatic quantum-coherent mesoscopic devices, including single- and double-quantum dot systems and a quantum point contact.
The precision of transport observables can be bounded by the entropy production and the activity of the transport process via kinetic and thermokinetic uncertainty relations. In linear bosonic systems, such uncertainty relations can provide tight bounds when the activity is replaced by a local activity of the measurement contact of interest---even in the strong-coupling regime. How much nonlinearities (or interactions) impact the validity and predictiveness of these local bounds and how much this impact depends on the concrete definition of activity are open questions that we address for two experimentally relevant model systems, a harmonic oscillator network and the intrinsically nonlinear spin-boson model. We thereby provide experimentally testable predictions on how nonlinearities impact or even break local kinetic and thermokinetic precision bounds.
Kinetic uncertainty relations impose a fundamental constraint on counting precision by requiring large dynamical activity to suppress fluctuations. For N independent constituents, the activity is additive and scales as O(N), so the corresponding precision bound improves only as O(1/N). A central question is whether many-body quantum systems can instead achieve Heisenberg scaling, with relative variance suppressed as O(1/N2). Such scaling could enable substantially enhanced precision in quantum devices, including quantum clocks. Superradiance appears to provide a natural route because its collective emission activity can scale as O(N2). We show, however, that superradiance alone fails to achieve Heisenberg scaling because this enhanced activity is transient. We then demonstrate that jump-conditioned quantum feedback stabilizes the superradiant high-activity regime and converts this collective enhancement into Heisenberg scaling. We establish this mechanism analytically using a many-body kinetic uncertainty relation and mean-field analysis, and demonstrate through quantum-trajectory simulations that the actual relative counting fluctuation scales as O(1/N2).