A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Joint measurability in nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics
Authors: Beyer Konstantin, Uola Roope, Luoma Kimmo, Strunz Walter T.
Publisher: AMER PHYSICAL SOC
Publication year: 2022
Journal: Physical review E
Journal acronym: PHYS REV E
Article number: L022101
Volume: 106
Issue: 2
Number of pages: 6
ISSN: 2470-0045
eISSN: 2470-0053
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.L022101
Web address : https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.L022101
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/176476566
Preprint address: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02854v1
In this Letter we investigate the concept of quantum work and its measurability from the viewpoint of quantum measurement theory. Very often, quantum work and fluctuation theorems are discussed in the framework of projective two-point measurement (TPM) schemes. According to a well-known no-go theorem, there is no work observable which satisfies both (i) an average work condition and (ii) the TPM statistics for diagonal input states. Such projective measurements represent a restrictive class among all possible measurements. It is desirable, both from a theoretical and experimental point of view, to extend the scheme to the general case including suitably designed unsharp measurements. This shifts the focus to the question of what information about work and its fluctuations one is able to extract from such generalized measurements. We show that the no-go theorem no longer holds if the observables in a TPM scheme are jointly measurable for any intermediate unitary evolution. We explicitly construct a model with unsharp energy measurements and derive bounds for the visibility that ensure joint measurability. In such an unsharp scenario a single work measurement apparatus can be constructed that allows us to determine the correct average work and to obtain free energy differences with the help of a Jarzynski equality.
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