Related papers: Measuring work and heat in ultracold quantum gases
We present a new method to measure the work $w$ performed on a driven quantum system and to sample its probability distribution $P(w)$. The method is based on a simple fact that remained unnoticed until now: Work on a quantum system can be…
We tackle the dynamical description of the quantum measurement process, by explicitly addressing the interaction between the system under investigation with the measurement apparatus, the latter ultimately considered as macroscopic quantum…
A calorimetric measurement has recently been proposed as a promising technique to measure thermodynamic quantities in a dissipative superconducting qubit. These measurements rely on the fact that the system is projected into energy…
The standard experimental techniques usually adopted in the study of the behaviour of ultracold atoms in optical lattices involve extracting the atom density profile from absorption images of the atomic sample after trap release. Quantum…
Non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics is essential to describe new devices that operate far from the regime where the usual thermodynamical laws are obeyed. When quantum fluctuations dominate, defining and measuring work and heat, two…
Positive Operator Value Measures (POVMs) are the most general class of quantum measurements. We propose a setup in which all possible POVMs of a single photon polarization state (corresponding to all possible sets of two-dimensional Kraus…
We review the use of an external auxiliary detector for measuring the full distribution of the work performed on or extracted from a quantum system during a unitary thermodynamic process. We first illustrate two paradigmatic schemes that…
Quantum measurement is ultimately a physical process, resulting from an interaction between the measured system and a measuring apparatus. Considering the physical process of measurement within a thermodynamic context naturally raises the…
In this paper we present a protocol for the implementation of a positive-operator-valued measure (POVM) on massive fermionic qubits. We present methods for implementing non-dispersive qubit transport, spin rotations and spin polarizing…
Measurement-based quantum heat engines have attracted significant interest as alternatives to conventional thermal engines, as they replace the hot thermal reservoir with quantum measurements, thereby offering greater controllability and…
We put forward the concept of work extraction from thermal noise by phase-sensitive (homodyne) measurements of the noisy input followed by (outcome-dependent) unitary manipulations of the post-measured state. For optimized measurements,…
We report an optical detector with tunable positive operator-valued measures (POVMs). The device is based on a combination of weak-field homodyne techniques and photon-number-resolving detection. The resulting POVMs can be continuously…
In quantum thermodynamics, the standard approach to estimate work fluctuations in unitary processes is based on two projective measurements, one performed at the beginning of the process and one at the end. The first measurement destroys…
We obtain the standard quadrature-phase positive operator-valued measure (POVM) for homodyne detection directly and rigorously from the POVM for photon counting without directly employing the mean field approximation for the local…
We discuss a balanced homodyne detection scheme with imperfect detectors in the framework of the operational approach to quantum measurement. We show that a realistic homodyne measurement is described by a family of operational observables…
In this article, we address the problem of how temperature of a quantum system is observed. By proposing a thought experiment, we argue that temperature must be conceived as an operator and its measurement must necessarily accompany a…
To define the work performed on a driven quantum system in a physically sound way has turned out to be a truly non-trivial task, except in some special cases of limited applicability. This topic has been in a focus of intense research…
We analyze theoretically the measurement of the mean output work and its fluctuations in a recently proposed optomechanical quantum heat engine [K. Zhang {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf112}, 150602 (2014)]. After showing that this work…
Probes that measure the local thermal properties of systems out of equilibrium are emerging as new tools in the study of nanoscale systems. One can then measure the temperature of a probe that is weakly coupled to a bias-driven system. By…
It is commonly believed that the most general type of a quantum-mechanical measurement is one described by a positive-operator valued measure (POVM). In the present paper, this statement is proven for any measurements on quantum systems…