Irreversibility of decorrelating processes: an experimental assessment in cavity QED
Abstract
Entropy production quantifies the amount of irreversibility of a physical process, leading to fundamental bounds for thermodynamic quantities. It captures the inability to run a physical system forward and then backward, bringing it to the same initial state. Considerable research has been carried out in the last decades to extend entropy production to non-equilibrium quantum processes. We experimentally investigate the entropy production of such forward-backward cycles affected by genuinely quantum irreversibility. Namely, we consider processes realized to erase different types of correlations between two interacting systems, from obliterating solely quantum coherence to completely decorrelating local states. This makes the measurement of entropy production experimentally challenging. Addressing this challenge is the purpose of this paper.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.07011,
title = {Irreversibility of decorrelating processes: an experimental assessment in cavity QED},
author = {Guillaume Cœuret Cauquil and Patrice A. Camati and Irénée Frerot and Zheng Tan and Alexia Auffèves and Igor Dotsenko},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07011},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
11 pages, 6 figures