Measurement of work and heat in the classical and quantum regimes

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.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Fluctuation theorems: Work is not an observable
• Reconstruction of non-classical cavity field states with snapshots of their decoherence
• Fast electron thermometry towards ultra-sensitive calorimetric detection
• Probing Quantum Interference Effects in the Work Distribution
• Heat-exchange statistics in driven open quantum systems
• Work and its fluctuations in a driven quantum system
• Measurement-dependent corrections to work distributions arising from quantum coherences
• Incomplete measurement of work in a dissipative two level system

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Kirkwood-Dirac quasiprobability approach to the statistics of incompatible observables
• Quasiprobabilities in quantum thermodynamics and many-body systems
• Work statistics, quantum signatures and enhanced work extraction in quadratic fermionic models
• Interferometry of quantum correlation functions to access quasiprobability distribution of work
• Quasi-probabilities of work and heat in an open quantum system
• Quantum speed limit for Kirkwood-Dirac quasiprobabilities
• Quantum gradient evaluation through quantum non-demolition measurements
• Non-positive energy quasidistributions in coherent collision models
• Experimental demonstration of generalized quantum fluctuation theorems in the presence of coherence
• Quantum Non-Demolition Measurements and Leggett-Garg inequality