No Arabic abstract
We present a collision model for the charging of a quantum battery by identical nonequilibrium qubit units. When the units are prepared in a mixture of energy eigenstates, the energy gain in the battery can be described by a classical random walk, where both average energy and variance grow linearly with time. Conversely, when the qubits contain quantum coherence, interference effects buildup in the battery and lead to a faster spreading of the energy distribution, reminiscent of a quantum random walk. This can be exploited for faster and more efficient charging of a battery initialized in the ground state. Specifically, we show that coherent protocols can yield higher charging power than any possible incoherent strategy, demonstrating a quantum speed-up at the level of a single battery. Finally, we characterize the amount of extractable work from the battery through the notion of ergotropy.
Quantum batteries are miniature energy storage devices and play a very important role in quantum thermodynamics. In recent years, quantum batteries have been extensively studied, but limited in theoretical level. Here we report the experimental realization of a quantum battery based on superconducting qubits. Our model explores dark and bright states to achieve stable and powerful charging processes, respectively. Our scheme makes use of the quantum adiabatic brachistochrone, which allows us to speed up the {battery ergotropy injection. Due to the inherent interaction of the system with its surrounding, the battery exhibits a self-discharge, which is shown to be described by a supercapacitor-like self-discharging mechanism. Our results paves the way for proposals of new superconducting circuits able to store extractable work for further usage.
One of the most fundamental tasks in quantum thermodynamics is extracting energy from one system and subsequently storing this energy in an appropriate battery. Both of these steps, work extraction and charging, can be viewed as cyclic Hamiltonian processes acting on individual quantum systems. Interestingly, so-called passive states exist, whose energy cannot be lowered by unitary operations, but it is safe to assume that the energy of any not fully charged battery may be increased unitarily. However, unitaries raising the average energy by the same amount may differ in qualities such as their precision, fluctuations, and charging power. Moreover, some unitaries may be extremely difficult to realize in practice. It is hence of crucial importance to understand the qualities that can be expected from practically implementable transformations. Here, we consider the limitations on charging batteries when restricting to the feasibly realizable family of Gaussian unitaries. We derive optimal protocols for general unitary operations as well as for the restriction to easier implementable Gaussian unitaries. We find that practical Gaussian battery charging, while performing significantly less well than is possible in principle, still offers asymptotically vanishing relative charge variances and fluctuations.
We propose a method of accelerating the speed of evolution of an open system by an external classical driving field for a qubit in a zero-temperature structured reservoir. It is shown that, with a judicious choice of the driving strength of the applied classical field, a speed-up evolution of an open system can be achieved in both the weak system-environment couplings and the strong system-environment couplings. By considering the relationship between non-Makovianity of environment and the classical field, we can drive the open system from the Markovian to the non-Markovian regime by manipulating the driving strength of classical field. That is the intrinsic physical reason that the classical field may induce the speed-up process. In addition, the roles of this classical field on the variation of quantum evolution speed in the whole decoherence process is discussed.
Increasing demand for algorithms that can learn quickly and efficiently has led to a surge of development within the field of artificial intelligence (AI). An important paradigm within AI is reinforcement learning (RL), where agents interact with environments by exchanging signals via a communication channel. Agents can learn by updating their behaviour based on obtained feedback. The crucial question for practical applications is how fast agents can learn to respond correctly. An essential figure of merit is therefore the learning time. While various works have made use of quantum mechanics to speed up the agents decision-making process, a reduction in learning time has not been demonstrated yet. Here we present a RL experiment where the learning of an agent is boosted by utilizing a quantum communication channel with the environment. We further show that the combination with classical communication enables the evaluation of such an improvement, and additionally allows for optimal control of the learning progress. This novel scenario is therefore demonstrated by considering hybrid agents, that alternate between rounds of quantum and classical communication. We implement this learning protocol on a compact and fully tunable integrated nanophotonic processor. The device interfaces with telecom-wavelength photons and features a fast active feedback mechanism, allowing us to demonstrate the agents systematic quantum advantage in a setup that could be readily integrated within future large-scale quantum communication networks.
We achieve a quantum speed-up of fully polynomial randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS) for estimating partition functions that combine simulated annealing with the Monte-Carlo Markov Chain method and use non-adaptive cooling schedules. The improvement in time complexity is twofold: a quadratic reduction with respect to the spectral gap of the underlying Markov chains and a quadratic reduction with respect to the parameter characterizing the desired accuracy of the estimate output by the FPRAS. Both reductions are intimately related and cannot be achieved separately. First, we use Grovers fixed point search, quantum walks and phase estimation to efficiently prepare approximate coherent encodings of stationary distributions of the Markov chains. The speed-up we obtain in this way is due to the quadratic relation between the spectral and phase gaps of classical and quantum walks. Second, we generalize the method of quantum counting, showing how to estimate expected values of quantum observables. Using this method instead of classical sampling, we obtain the speed-up with respect to accuracy.