No Arabic abstract
The possibility of discriminating the statistics of a thermal bath using indirect measurements performed on quantum probes is presented. The scheme relies on the fact that, when weakly coupled with the environment of interest, the transient evolution of the probe toward its final thermal configuration, is strongly affected by the fermionic or bosonic nature of the bath excitations. Using figures of merit taken from quantum metrology such as the Holevo-Helstrom probability of error and the Quantum Chernoff bound, we discuss how to achieve the greatest precision in this statistics tagging procedure, analyzing different models of probes and different initial preparations and by optimizing over the time of exposure of the probe.
We investigate the influence of a weakly nonlinear Josephson bath consisting of a chain of Josephson junctions on the dynamics of a small quantum system (LC oscillator). Focusing on the regime where the charging energy is the largest energy scale, we perturbatively calculate the correlation function of the Josephson bath to the leading order in the Josephson energy divided by the charging energy while keeping the cosine potential exactly. When the variation of the charging energy along the chain ensures fast decay of the bath correlation function, the dynamics of the LC oscillator that is weakly and capacitively coupled to the Josephson bath can be solved through the Markovian master equation. We establish a duality relation for the Josephson bath between the regimes of large charging and Josephson energies respectively. The results can be applied to cases where the charging energy either is nonuniformly engineered or disordered in the chain. Furthermore, we find that the Josephson bath may become non-Markovian when the temperature is increased beyond the zero-temperature limit in that the bath correlation function gets shifted by a constant and does not decay with time.
Describing open quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the environment is mesoscopic, when it develops nonequilibrium features during the evolution, or when the memory effects cannot be disregarded. Here, we derive a master equation that explicitly accounts for system-bath correlations and includes, at a coarse-grained level, a dynamically evolving bath. Such a master equation applies to a wide variety of physical systems including those described by Random Matrix Theory or the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis. We obtain a local detailed balance condition which, interestingly, does not forbid the emergence of stable negative temperature states in unison with the definition of temperature through the Boltzmann entropy. We benchmark the master equation against the exact evolution and observe a very good agreement in a situation where the conventional Born-Markov-secular master equation breaks down. Interestingly, the present description of the dynamics is robust and it remains accurate even if some of the assumptions are relaxed. Even though our master equation describes a dynamically evolving bath not described by a Gibbs state, we provide a consistent nonequilibrium thermodynamic framework and derive the first and second law as well as the Clausius inequality. Our work paves the way for studying a variety of nanoscale quantum technologies including engines, refrigerators, or heat pumps beyond the conventionally employed assumption of a static thermal bath.
As the dimensions of physical systems approach the nanoscale, the laws of thermodynamics must be reconsidered due to the increased importance of fluctuations and quantum effects. While the statistical mechanics of small classical systems is relatively well understood, the quantum case still poses challenges. Here we set up a formalism that allows to calculate the full probability distribution of energy exchanges between a periodically driven quantum system and a thermalized heat reservoir. The formalism combines Floquet theory with a generalized master equation approach. For a driven two-level system and in the long-time limit, we obtain a universal expression for the distribution, providing clear physical insight into the exchanged energy quanta. We illustrate our approach in two analytically solvable cases and discuss the differences in the corresponding distributions. Our predictions could be directly tested in a variety of systems, including optical cavities and solid-state devices.
We consider stochastic and open quantum systems with a finite number of states, where a stochastic transition between two specific states is monitored by a detector. The long-time counting statistics of the observed realizations of the transition, parametrized by cumulants, is the only available information about the system. We present an analytical method for reconstructing generators of the time evolution of the system compatible with the observations. The practicality of the reconstruction method is demonstrated by the examples of a laser-driven atom and the kinetics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. Moreover, we propose cumulant-based criteria for testing the non-classicality and non-Markovianity of the time evolution, and lower bounds for the system dimension. Our analytical results rely on the close connection between the cumulants of the counting statistics and the characteristic polynomial of the generator, which takes the role of the cumulant generating function.
We demonstrate through exact solutions that a spin bath leads to stronger (faster) dephasing of a qubit than a bosonic bath with identical bath-coupling spectrum. This difference is due to the spin-bath dressing by the coupling. Consequently, the quantum statistics of the bath strongly affects the pulse sequences required to dynamically decouple the qubit from its bath.