Fundamental Limitations to Local Energy Extraction in Quantum Systems

Álvaro M. Alhambra, Georgios Styliaris, Nayeli A. Rodríguez-Briones, Jamie Sikora, and Eduardo Martín-Martínez
Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 190601 – Published 5 November 2019
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Abstract

We examine when it is possible to locally extract energy from a bipartite quantum system in the presence of strong coupling and entanglement, a task which is expected to be restricted by entanglement in the low-energy eigenstates. We fully characterize this distinct notion of “passivity” by finding necessary and sufficient conditions for such extraction to be impossible, using techniques from semidefinite programing. This is the first time in which such techniques are used in the context of energy extraction, which opens a way of exploring further kinds of passivity in quantum thermodynamics. We also significantly strengthen a previous result of Frey et al., by showing a physically relevant quantitative bound on the threshold temperature at which this passivity appears. Furthermore, we show how this no-go result also holds for thermal states in the thermodynamic limit, provided that the spatial correlations decay sufficiently fast, and we give numerical examples.

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  • Received 13 February 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.190601

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Quantum Information, Science & TechnologyStatistical Physics & Thermodynamics

Authors & Affiliations

Álvaro M. Alhambra1, Georgios Styliaris2, Nayeli A. Rodríguez-Briones3,4,1, Jamie Sikora1, and Eduardo Martín-Martínez5,3,1

  • 1Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada*
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-0484, USA
  • 3Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada
  • 5Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada

  • *aalhambra@perimeterinstitute.ca

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Issue

Vol. 123, Iss. 19 — 8 November 2019

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