paper

Measurement of work and heat in the classical and quantum regimes

arXiv:2102.01493 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.103.L060202

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy variation in a quantum system and, second, the lack of experiments. Here, we report a full characterization of the dissipated heat, work and internal energy variation in a two-level quantum system interacting with an engineered environment. We use the IBMQ quantum computer to implement the driven system's dynamics in a dissipative environment. The experimental data allow us to construct quasi-probability distribution functions from which we recover the correct averages of work, heat and internal energy variation in the dissipative processes. Interestingly, by increasing the environment coupling strength, we observe a reduction of the pure quantum features of the energy exchange processes that we interpret as the emergence of the classical limit. This makes the present approach a privileged tool to study, understand and exploit quantum effects in energy exchanges.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (25)

Cited by in corpus (10)