English

Pulsed characteristic-function measurement of a thermalizing harmonic oscillator

Quantum Physics 2021-07-26 v2

Abstract

We present a method for the direct measurement of the Wigner characteristic function of a thermalizing harmonic oscillator that is completely inaccessible for control or measurement. The strategy employs a recently proposed probe-measurement-based scheme [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 110406 (2019)] which relies on the pulsed control of a two-level probe. We generalize this scheme to the case of a nonunitary time evolution of the target harmonic oscillator, describing its thermalization through contact to a finite-temperature environment, given in the form of a Lindblad master equation. This generalization is achieved using a superoperator formalism and yields analytical expressions for the direct measurement of the characteristic function, accounting for the decoherence during the measurement process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.00877,
  title  = {Pulsed characteristic-function measurement of a thermalizing harmonic oscillator},
  author = {Ralf Betzholz and Yu Liu and Jianming Cai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.00877},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:36:35.827Z