Speaker: Jordi Mur-Petit
Affiliation: Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford
Date: Friday, 11 May 2018 at 12:30
Location: Seminar Room, Serrano 121 (CFMAC)
Non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems pose some of the most challenging open problems in Physics, such as how do quantum systems relax towards equilibrium or how could it be possible to extract work from them [1]. The emergent field of quantum thermodynamics applies principles and ideas from statistical mechanics and provides general results about these open questions. Among these results, the quantum fluctuation relations (QFRs) are especially powerful, as they lead to the formulation of new measurement protocols for thermometry in ultra-cold setups [2] and on work statistics in out-of-equilibrium processes [3], as recently demonstrated in pioneering experiments with trapped ions [4].
I will offer a review of these advances and discuss the limitations of QFRs when trying to obtain information about a quantum system with conserved charges. After this, I will present a new set of generalized fluctuation relations that are suitable for such a system, and illustrate its impact in a proposed trapped-ion experiment [5].
I will also provide an overview of ongoing research at interrogating complex quantum systems with quantum probes [6], and talk about new avenues opened up by certain recent advances that have been made concerning the trapping and cooling of diatomic molecules [7].
[1] See S. Vinjanampathy, J. Anders, Contemp. Phys. 57, 545 (2016) for a recent review.
[2] T. H. Johnson et al., Phys. Rev. A 93, 053619 (2016)
[3] R. Dorner et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 230601 (2013); also L. Mazzola et al., ibid. 110, 230602 (2013), and T. B. Batalhão et al., ibid. 113, 140601 (2014).
[4] S. An et al., Nature Phys. 11, 193 (2015); also J. Roßnagel et al., Science 352, 325 (2016).
[5] J. Mur-Petit, A. Relaño, R. A. Molina, D. Jaksch, Nature Comms. (2018); in the press, preprint available at arXiv:1711.00871.
[6] A. Usui, B. Buča, J. Mur-Petit. Quantum probe spectroscopy for cold atomic systems [arXiv:1804.09237].
[7] J. A. Blackmore et al., Ultracold Molecules: A Platform for Quantum Simulation [arXiv:1804.02372].