Measuring Heat in a Quantum Process

Dr Kavan Modi

School of Physics, Monash University, Clayton

3:30 pm Wednesday, 19 September 2014, EN103 Lecture Theatre (EN Building), Hawthorn.

Accurately describing work extraction is a central objective of thermodynamics. Therefore measuring work, heat, and temperature are the essential to the theory of thermodynamics. However, In order to measure the work done on a system or heat exchange with a bath, one has to know the state of the system and the Hamiltonian throughout the process. This is typically not possible for a quantum process. The concepts of work and heat are surprisingly subtle when generalizations are made to arbitrary quantum processes. We use schemes to measure work distribution, recently developed in [PRLs 110, 230601 and 230602 (2013)], to measure heat distribution for discrete quantum processes, described by completely-positive trace preserving maps. Our scheme should pave the way for experimental explorations of the Landauer principle and hence the intricate energy to information conversion in mesoscopic quantum systems.

References: Phys. Rev. E 90, 020101(R), arXiv:1402.4499, arXiv:1406.2801

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