English

Thermodynamic resources in continuous-variable quantum systems

Quantum Physics 2021-03-31 v2 Statistical Mechanics Optics

Abstract

Thermodynamic resources, beyond their well-known usefulness in work extraction and other thermodynamic tasks, are often important also in tasks that are not evidently thermodynamic. Here we develop a framework for identifying such resources in diverse applications of bosonic continuous-variable systems. Introducing the class of bosonic linear thermal operations to model operationally-feasible processes, we apply this model to identify uniquely quantum properties of bosonic states that refine classical notions of thermodynamic resourcefulness. Among these are (1) a suite of temperature-like quantities generalizing the equilibrium temperature to quantum, non-equilibrium scenarios; (2) signal-to-noise ratios quantifying a system's capacity to carry information in phase-space displacement; and (3) well-established non-classicality measures quantifying the resolution in sensing and parameter estimation tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.07364,
  title  = {Thermodynamic resources in continuous-variable quantum systems},
  author = {Varun Narasimhachar and Syed Assad and Felix C. Binder and Jayne Thompson and Benjamin Yadin and Mile Gu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07364},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

9 pages (6 figures), 4-page supplemental material

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:17:02.047Z