Low-control and robust quantum refrigerator and applications with electronic spins in diamond

Abstract

We propose a general protocol for low-control refrigeration and thermometry of thermal qubits, which can be implemented using electronic spins in diamond. The refrigeration is implemented by a probe, consisting of a network of interacting spins. The protocol involves two operations: (i) free evolution of the probe; and (ii) a swap gate between one spin in the probe and the thermal qubit we wish to cool. We show that if the initial state of the probe falls within a suitable range, and the free evolution of the probe is both unital and conserves the excitation in the $z$-direction, then the cooling protocol will always succeed, with an efficiency that depends on the rate of spin dephasing and the swap gate fidelity. Furthermore, measuring the probe after it has cooled many qubits provides an estimate of their temperature. We provide a specific example where the probe is a Heisenberg spin chain, and suggest a physical implementation using electronic spins in diamond. Here the probe is constituted of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, while the thermal qubits are dark spins. By using a novel pulse sequence, a chain of NV centers can be made to evolve according to a Heisenberg Hamiltonian. This proposal allows for a range of applications, such as NV-based nuclear magnetic resonance of photosensitive molecules kept in a dark spot on a sample, and it opens up possibilities for the study of quantum thermodynamics, environment-assisted sensing, and many-body physics.

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• Robust Dynamic Hamiltonian Engineering of Many-Body Spin Systems
• Quantum coherence, many-body correlations, and non-thermal effects for autonomous thermal machines
• Optically Enhanced Electric Field Sensing Using Nitrogen-Vacancy Ensembles
• Optimal Probes for Global Quantum Thermometry
• Quantum machines powered by correlated baths
• Characterization of an operational quantum resource in a critical many-body system
• Individual Control and Readout of Qubits in a Sub-Diffraction Volume
• Efficiency of a cyclic quantum heat engine with finite-size baths
• Designing refrigerators in higher dimensions using quantum spin models
• Bi-frequency illumination: a quantum-enhanced protocol
• Ultrastrong magnetic light-matter interaction with cavity mode engineering