Quantum measurements are known to affect the state of the measured system. Such a measurement backaction is due to the interaction of the quantum system with the measuring device. When the measured observable and the system's Hamiltonian do not commute, the backaction can lead to a mean energy change of the system. This energy change has been dubbed "quantum heat" and, in association with feedback processes and/or the interaction with thermal bath(s), proves to be a genuinely quantum resource to fuel new kinds quantum engines. We propose such a measurement powered engine exploiting the non-commutativity of local and non-local operations on a bipartite quantum system.We then investigate the origin of the quantum heat. Even if one cannot model the full dynamics of a measurement due to the collapse of the wavefunction, the energetic aspects can still be investigated by modeling the so-called pre-measurement. During this step, the system interacts and gets correlated with a quantum system which can be viewed as a small part of the measuring apparatus and called the quantum meter. Ideally, at the end of this process, the system's reduced state will be fully decohered in the measurement basis, thus corresponding to the averaged collapsed output states given by the measurement postulate. We find that the quantum heat received by the measured system corresponds to the energy necessary to turn off the coupling between the meter and the system. Using generalized definitions of heat and work, we moreover characterize the work and heat nature of these energy exchanges.Tracing the source of this energy one step further, we propose an autonomous description of a measurement. This is done by considering a flying qubit measured by the quantum field of the cavity it crosses. The interaction being position dependent, the kinetic degree of freedom is providing the required energy to switch on and off the interaction between the qubit and the meter field. A full quantum treatment allows us to evaluate the impact of the finite spatial and momentum extension of the qubit wavepacket. Since the kinetic degree of freedom can be affected by the interaction, it does not simply generate a time dependent Hamiltonian for the other degrees of freedom. We find the correction to this ideal dynamic and analyse its consequences on the nature of the energy fluxes. %spread/extension/broadnessTaking the opposite point of view, we compare the measurement cost of a qubit by a field propagating in a waveguide, depending on the initial state of the field. In the context of a circuit quantum electrodynamics setup, we find that thermal and coherent fields induce the same backaction on the qubit given the same energy constraints.The results presented and discussed in this thesis contribute to unravel the mysterious effects and mechanisms due to quantum measurements. Notably, they give an outlook to further analyse quantum measurement-based engines and to understand the energetic resource that measurements cost and constitute at the same time.
Quantum measurements are known to affect the state of the measured system. Such a measurement backaction is due to the interaction of the quantum system with the measuring device. When the measured observable and the system's Hamiltonian do not commute, the backaction can lead to a mean energy change of the system. This energy change has been dubbed "quantum heat" and, in association with feedback processes and/or the interaction with thermal bath(s), proves to be a genuinely quantum resource to fuel new kinds quantum engines. We propose such a measurement powered engine exploiting the non-commutativity of local and non-local operations on a bipartite quantum system.We then investigate the origin of the quantum heat. Even if one cannot model the full dynamics of a measurement due to the collapse of the wavefunction, the energetic aspects can still be investigated by modeling the so-called pre-measurement. During this step, the system interacts and gets correlated with a quantum system which can be viewed as a small part of the measuring apparatus and called the quantum meter. Ideally, at the end of this process, the system's reduced state will be fully decohered in the measurement basis, thus corresponding to the averaged collapsed output states given by the measurement postulate. We find that the quantum heat received by the measured system corresponds to the energy necessary to turn off the coupling between the meter and the system. Using generalized definitions of heat and work, we moreover characterize the work and heat nature of these energy exchanges.Tracing the source of this energy one step further, we propose an autonomous description of a measurement. This is done by considering a flying qubit measured by the quantum field of the cavity it crosses. The interaction being position dependent, the kinetic degree of freedom is providing the required energy to switch on and off the interaction between the qubit and the meter field. A full quantum treatment allows us to evaluate the impact of the finite spatial and momentum extension of the qubit wavepacket. Since the kinetic degree of freedom can be affected by the interaction, it does not simply generate a time dependent Hamiltonian for the other degrees of freedom. We find the correction to this ideal dynamic and analyse its consequences on the nature of the energy fluxes. %spread/extension/broadnessTaking the opposite point of view, we compare the measurement cost of a qubit by a field propagating in a waveguide, depending on the initial state of the field. In the context of a circuit quantum electrodynamics setup, we find that thermal and coherent fields induce the same backaction on the qubit given the same energy constraints.The results presented and discussed in this thesis contribute to unravel the mysterious effects and mechanisms due to quantum measurements. Notably, they give an outlook to further analyse quantum measurement-based engines and to understand the energetic resource that measurements cost and constitute at the same time.
Considering a general microscopic model for a quantum measuring apparatus comprising a quantum probe coupled to a thermal bath, we analyze the energetic resources necessary for the realization of a quantum measurement, which includes the creation of system-apparatus correlations, the irreversible transition to a statistical mixture of definite outcomes, and the apparatus resetting. Crucially, we do not resort to another quantum measurement to capture the emergence of objective measurement results, but rather exploit the properties of the thermal bath which redundantly records the measurement result in its degrees of freedom, naturally implementing the paradigm of quantum Darwinism. In practice, this model allows us to perform a quantitative thermodynamic analysis of the measurement process. From the expression of the second law, we show how the minimal required work depends on the energy variation of the system being measured plus information-theoretic quantities characterizing the performance of the measurement – efficiency and completeness. Additionally, we show that it is possible to perform a thermodynamically reversible measurement, thus reaching the minimal work expenditure, and provide the corresponding protocol. Finally, for finite-time measurement protocols, we illustrate the increasing work cost induced by rising entropy production inherent in finite-time thermodynamic processes. This highlights an emerging trade-off between velocity of the measurement and work cost, on top of a trade-off between efficiency of the measurement and work cost. We apply those findings to bring new insights in the thermodynamic balance of the measurement-powered quantum engines.
According to the axioms of quantum mechanics, there exists a quantum measurement corresponding to each observable.Energy is one of such observables, and the operator of the energy is called Hamiltonian.The Hamiltonian specifies the dynamics of closed quantum systems and it also characterizes the property of the equilibrium state in contact with a heat bath.Therefore the energy is an essential quantity in quantum mechanics, which characterizes behavior of a quantum system.On the other hand, since the Hamiltonian is not a local observable in general, a concrete construction of how to apply the quantum measurement of energy is not trivial.Thus various measurement models of energies have been proposed, and also discussions have been made on whether the time is a resource to be consumed to increase the precision of energy measurement in connection with the time-energy uncertainty relationship.Constructing a way to implement the energy measurement on an unknown Hamiltonian system is important, since it avoids constructing a new measurement scheme for each new quantum system.On the other hand, among measurements of energy, the projective measurement of energy has useful properties for applications.The projective measurement is a measurement which satisfies the condition so-called repeatable hypothesis that when we measure the state immediately after obtaining an outcome from the same measurement, we obtain the same outcome again.In this thesis, we consider two schemes to implement the projective measurement of energy for an unknown Hamiltonian system.One is a tomography based method, which is a construction suggested in the paper of Aharanov et.al. (2002).The other is the phase estimation based method, which utilizes the Hamiltonian dynamics of the system as a resource for the quantum algorithm, and realizes the projective measurement of energy on the system without identifying all parameters of the Hamiltonian.In this thesis, we assume there is a finite dimensional quantum system (quantum computer) which is able to apply any interaction between the target system and the finite dimensional system although the interaction should not depend on the target system Hamiltonian.To evaluate the performance of the measurements implemented by the two schemes, we formulate two evaluation functions called fluctuation of measurement value and non-repeatability, which can evaluate how much a measurement is different from the ideal projective measurement of an observable.We calculate a sufficient time to guarantee the fluctuation of measurement value below some small value ε, for each of the two measurement schemes.We find that the tomography based method takes the time proportional to O(d 4 ∆ max /ε), while the phase estimation based method takes O(∆ 3 max /ε 2 ), where d is the dimension of the target system and ∆ max is the difference between the largest energy eigenvalue and the smallest energy eigenvalue.We show that the phase estimation based method performs better for large particle systems.
When a measurement observable does not commute with a quantum system's Hamiltonian, the energy of the measured system is typically not conserved during the measurement. Instead, energy can be transferred between the measured system and the meter. In this work, we experimentally investigate the energetics of noncommuting measurements in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system containing a transmon qubit embedded in a 3D microwave cavity. We show through spectral analysis of the cavity photons that a frequency shift is imparted on the probe, in balance with the associated energy changes of the qubit. Our experiment provides new insights into foundations of quantum measurement, as well as a better understanding of the key mechanisms at play in quantum energetics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Technological advances over the past few decades have made it possible to address quantum systems down to individual quanta of energy. Artificial atoms are now routinely fabricated and manipulated using solid-state technology. Exciting new applications are now within grasp, such as quantum heat engines, which have been theorised to achieve energy efficiencies not possible for their classical counterparts. Energy fluctuations are an inherent part of these devices and a detailed understanding of them is required. However, the proper theoretical framework under which such fluctuations are to be understood is still debated. In this thesis, we study energy fluctuations in open quantum systems at the level of individual runs of an experimental protocol. This work has been carried out in two parts. In the first part, we focus on calorimetric measurements – a promising new experimental protocol to continuously measure energy fluctuations of a qubit interacting with a thermal environment. Applying the protocol to more complex systems is not straightforward. Using a simple two-level approximation, we show that for some experimental parameters this protocol can be extended to a driven harmonic oscillator. Another aspect of the calorimetric protocol is that it can induce non-Markovian effects which affect how work and heat are defined. We quantify the degree of non-Markovianity induced by this measurement protocol, when applied to a qubit, based on a previously developed theoretical model. Importantly, we show that non-Markovianity does not necessarily decrease monotonically with the environment size. The attempt to extend the calorimetric protocol to general systems has led to the second part of this thesis. The calorimetric detection is a particular case of a continuously monitored system. However, other schemes exist that lead to different definitions of work and heat. Reconciling these approaches is not straightforward, as evidenced by the many work definitions present in the literature. The difficulty is centred at the fact that, in the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, energy is not always a well-defined quantity. Here, based on the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics, we put forward a general framework to remove this problem in a clear conceptual manner. In particular, we show that the classical definition of work for closed systems can be straightforwardly generalised to the quantum case. For an open system, we used the Bohmian conditional wave function which provides a stochastic state evolution for the open system. We show that this approach can lead to new insights regarding the role of entanglement in energy fluctuations and has the potential to provide a general and observer-independent framework of energy fluctuations in open quantum systems. The results presented in this thesis give a small contribution to the developing field of quantum thermodynamics.
In bipartite quantum systems commutation relations between the Hamiltonian of each subsystem and the interaction impose fundamental constraints on the dynamics of each partition. Here we investigate work, heat and entropy production in bipartite systems characterized by particular commutators between their local Hamiltonians and the interaction operator. We consider the formalism of (Weimer et al 2008 Europhys. Lett. 83 30008 ), in which heat (work) is identified with energy changes that (do not) alter the local von Neumann entropy, as observed in an effective local measurement basis. We demonstrate the consequences of the commutation relations on the work and heat fluxes into each partition, and extend the formalism to open quantum systems where one, or both, partitions are subject to a Markovian thermal bath. We also discuss the relation between heat and entropy in bipartite quantum systems out of thermal equilibrium, and reconcile the aforementioned approach with the second law of thermodynamics.
Quantum thermodynamics (QT) is an emerging field of research that aims to investigate how the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics merge together in small quantum systems.With advances at the necessary technology to control and measure those small physical systems this field has acquired even more importance, not only in the sense that it can be tested, which is a good thing for basic research, but that new applications could be implemented at these scales, so a better comprehension of the limitations imposed by quantum thermodynamics turns out to be of crucial importance for these goals, which forces theoreticians to produce experimentally relevant versions of these new concepts.Another important aspect present at those systems is that part of them work in a regime where its constituents are described by non-thermal states, and in particular non-thermal steady states, which brings to light a different thermodynamic description, usually called steady-state thermodynamics, therefore one of the goals that we are willing to achieve with this thesis is to give an introduction to QT of systems out-of-equilibrium.One of the related subtopics that physicists deal with in QT and the one that we will be focusing on this work are the use of non-thermal stationary states to build heat engines in the quantum domain, and the analyses of the features that this new regime could possibly allow, like the use of quantum resources as a way to overcome classical limitations imposed on its performance, like to attain efficiencies higher than Carnot's or operate in certain regimes unattainable using only classical resources.Therefore, in order to clarify the underlying physics of those systems in a non-thermal regime, any experimentally well suited content is more than welcome.So keeping that in mind we devised an experimentally relevant thermodynamic cycle for a transmon qubit WS interacting with a non-thermal environment composed by two subsystems, an externally excited cavity and a classical heat bath with temperature T. The WS undergoes a non-conventional cycle (different from Otto, Carnot, etc.) through a succession of non-thermal stationary states obtained by slowly varying its bare frequency and the amplitude of the field applied on the cavity.The efficiency of this engine obtains a maximum value up to 47% in the regime of operation used.We also wanted to look for the role played by the different types of coherences, present at the WS, on the behavior of the engine and its efficiency.By different types of coherence we mean the so called modes of coherence, whose definition is based on how they respond to symmetry transformations.We did that for the trivial case of the qubit, that only contains the modes 1 and -1, and that has shown to be extremely important for the efficiency of the machine.The same procedure was repeated for a 3-level system WS.The modes 1 and -1 was again very important, not only to the absolute value of the engine's efficiency but to the regime of operation of the machine.The additional modes, 2 and -2, had a negative impact on the efficiency, reducing its absolute value.This result appears to show some evidences that quantumness won't necessarily bring improvements to the operation of those machines.