Quantum-Heat Fluctuation Relations in Three-Level Systems Under Projective Measurements

We study the statistics of energy fluctuations in a three-level quantum system subject to a sequence of projective quantum measurements. We check that, as expected, the quantum Jarzynski equality holds provided that the initial state is thermal. The latter condition is trivially satisfied for two-le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCondensed matter Vol. 5; no. 1; p. 17
Main Authors Giachetti, Guido, Gherardini, Stefano, Trombettoni, Andrea, Ruffo, Stefano
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published MDPI AG 01.03.2020
Subjects
Analysis
fluctuation theorems
Fluctuations (Physics)
Forecasts and trends
Heating
Measurement
nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
Quantum mechanics
quantum thermodynamics
Statistical mechanics
Italy
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Summary:We study the statistics of energy fluctuations in a three-level quantum system subject to a sequence of projective quantum measurements. We check that, as expected, the quantum Jarzynski equality holds provided that the initial state is thermal. The latter condition is trivially satisfied for two-level systems, while this is generally no longer true for N-level systems, with N > 2 . Focusing on three-level systems, we discuss the occurrence of a unique energy scale factor β eff that formally plays the role of an effective inverse temperature in the Jarzynski equality. To this aim, we introduce a suitable parametrization of the initial state in terms of a thermal and a non-thermal component. We determine the value of β eff for a large number of measurements and study its dependence on the initial state. Our predictions could be checked experimentally in quantum optics.
ISSN:2410-3896
2410-3896
DOI:10.3390/condmat5010017