Quantum thermodynamics is emerging both as a topic of fundamental research and as means to understand and potentially improve the performance of quantum devices. A prominent platform for achieving the necessary manipulation of quantum states is super
conducting circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED). In this platform, thermalization of a quantum system can be achieved by interfacing the circuit QED subsystem with a thermal reservoir of appropriate Hilbert dimensionality. Here we study heat transport through an assembly consisting of a superconducting qubit capacitively coupled between two nominally identical coplanar waveguide resonators, each equipped with a heat reservoir in the form of a normal-metal mesoscopic resistor termination. We report the observation of tunable photonic heat transport through the resonator-qubit-resonator assembly, showing that the reservoir-to-reservoir heat flux depends on the interplay between the qubit-resonator and the resonator-reservoir couplings, yielding qualitatively dissimilar results in different coupling regimes. Our quantum heat valve is relevant for the realisation of quantum heat engines and refrigerators, that can be obtained, for example, by exploiting the time-domain dynamics and coherence of driven superconducting qubits. This effort would ultimately bridge the gap between the fields of quantum information and thermodynamics of mesoscopic systems.
Superconductivity can be understood in terms of a phase transition from an uncorrelated electron gas to a condensate of Cooper pairs in which the relative phases of the constituent electrons are coherent over macroscopic length scales. The degree of
correlation is quantified by a complex-valued order parameter, whose amplitude is proportional to the strength of the pairing potential in the condensate. Supercurrent-carrying states are associated with non-zero values of the spatial gradient of the phase. The pairing potential and several physical observables of the Cooper condensate can be manipulated by means of temperature, current bias, dishomogeneities in the chemical composition or application of a magnetic field. Here we show evidence of complete suppression of the energy gap in the local density of quasiparticle states (DOS) of a superconducting nanowire upon establishing a phase difference equal to pi over a length scale comparable to the superconducting coherence length. These observations are consistent with a complete collapse of the pairing potential in the center of the wire, in accordance with theoretical modeling based on the quasiclassical theory of superconductivity in diffusive systems. Our spectroscopic data, fully exploring the phase-biased states of the condensate, highlight the profound effect that extreme phase gradients exert on the amplitude of the pairing potential. Moreover, the sharp magnetic response observed near the onset of the superconducting gap collapse regime can be exploited to realize ultra-low noise magnetic flux detectors.
