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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Experimental entanglement-enhanced work extraction based on a Maxwell’s demon

Mario Arnolfo Ciampini, Luca Mancino, Adeline Orieux, Caterina Vigliar, Mauro Paternostro, Paolo Mataloni, Marco Barbieri

Published Jan 1, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We adopt the paradigm of Maxwell’s demon to witness entanglement in a two-qubit state. Our experiment goes towards understanding how entanglement effects the efficiency of quantum thermodynamic machines, a problem of foundational and practical relevance.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2016.ftu4d.7

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Abstract The concept of Maxwell’s demon, proposed in classical physics as a means to extract work from a thermodynamics system beyond the constraints set by the second law of thermodynamics, has since been extended to modern quantum physics. Realization of the quantum Maxwell’s demon remains of actual interest given the potential of continuous-variable systems in quantum thermodynamics and current experimental opportunities. We propose a quantum Maxwell’s demon method, based on a Jaynes-Cummings two-level system, for subtracting bosonic energy inferred from successful measurements of excited qubits after linear and nonlinear interactions. The effect of these subtractions can suppress the tails of bosonic noise better than the linear interactions alone. The system statistics reaches an out-of-equilibrium state, becoming much closer to Poissonian distributions as indicated by the mean-to-noise ratio. The inclusion of a few additional optimal nonlinear subtractions can improve the success rate to ten times higher than the linear scheme, making the method significantly more efficient in exciting hundreds of qubits.
The interplay between thermal machines and quantum correlations is of great interest in both quantum thermodynamics and quantum information science. Recently, a quantum Szil\'ard engine has been proposed, showing that the quantum steerability between a Maxwell's demon and a work medium can be beneficial to a work extraction task. Nevertheless, this type of quantum-fueled machine is usually fragile in the presence of decoherence effects. Therefore, in this work we tackle this question by introducing a second demon who can access a control system and make the work medium pass through two dephasing channels in a manner of quantum superposition. Furthermore, we provide a quantum circuit to simulate our proposed concept and test it on IBMQ and IonQ quantum computers.
The essence of both classical and quantum engines is to extract useful energy (work) from stochastic energy sources, e.g., thermal baths. In Maxwell's demon engines, work extraction is assisted by a feedback control based on measurements performed by a demon, whose memory is erased at some nonzero energy cost. Here we propose a new type of quantum Maxwell's demon engine where work is directly extracted from the measurement channel, such that no heat bath is required. We show that in the Zeno regime of frequent measurements, memory erasure costs eventually vanish. Our findings provide a new paradigm to analyze quantum heat engines and work extraction in the quantum world.