English

Entropy of the quantum work distribution

Quantum Physics 2023-05-04 v2

Abstract

The statistics of work done on a quantum system can be quantified by the two-point measurement scheme. We show how the Shannon entropy of the work distribution admits a general upper bound depending on the initial diagonal entropy, and a purely quantum term associated to the relative entropy of coherence. We demonstrate that this approach captures strong signatures of the underlying physics in a diverse range of settings. In particular, we carry out a detailed study of the Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model and show that the entropy of the work distribution conveys very clearly the physics of the localization transition, which is not apparent from the statistical moments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.07896,
  title  = {Entropy of the quantum work distribution},
  author = {Anthony Kiely and Eoin O'Connor and Thomás Fogarty and Gabriel T. Landi and Steve Campbell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.07896},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures. Close to published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:39:43.273Z