Experimental test of the quantum Jarzynski equality with a trapped-ion system

By S. An, Jing-Ning Zhang, M. Um, Dingshun Lv, Yao Lu, Junhua Zhang, Zhang-Qi Yin, Hai-Tao Quan, Kihwan Kim. Nature Physics, 2014

333 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Jarzynski equality relates the free-energy difference between two equilibrium states to the work done on a system through far-from-equilibrium processes—a milestone that builds on the pioneering work of Clausius and Kelvin. Although experimental tests of the equality have been performed in the classical regime, the quantum Jarzynski equality has not yet been fully verified owing to experimental challenges in measuring work and work distributions in a quantum system. Here, we report an experimental test of the quantum Jarzynski equality with a single 171Yb+ ion trapped in a harmonic potential. We perform projective measurements to obtain phonon distributions of the initial thermal state. We then apply a laser-induced force to the projected energy eigenstate and find transition probabilities to final energy eigenstates after the work is done. By varying the speed with which we apply the force from the equilibrium to the far-from-equilibrium regime, we verify the quantum Jarzynski equality in an isolated system. The Jarzynski equality, relating non-equilibrium processes to free-energy differences between equilibrium states, has been verified in a number of classical systems. An ion-trap experiment now succeeds in demonstrating its quantum counterpart.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/135f3f7ec7ea2a152f4a1a7787595ff1933d27ca

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Citations in the corpus

Thermodynamics of Micro- and Nano-Systems Driven by Periodic Temperature Variations (2015, unknown): “This topic appears all the more urgent in the light of recent developments [5,55,56], showing that the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics nowadays comes within the range of experiments.”
The role of quantum information in thermodynamics—a topical review (2015, background): “It was proposed in [176] that these measurements could be reliably performed on a single trapped ion, an experiment that was recently performed [177].”
Programmable quantum simulations of spin systems with trapped ions (2019, background): “, 2009), quantum thermodynamics (An et al., 2015), and quantum heat engines/refrigerators (Maslennikov et al.”
Quantum thermodynamics (2015, methodology): “trapped ions to measure the quantum Jarzynski equality [89] with the two measurement methods used to derive the theoretical result in Section 3.”
Quantum Simulation Of The Quantum Rabi Model In A Trapped Ion (2017, methodology): “Red-sideband and blue-sideband interactions are described in the interaction picture by the Hamiltoni- ans [14, 26] Ĥred (t) = ηΩr 2 ( âσ̂+e iδrt + â†σ̂−e −iδrt ) , Ĥblue (t) = ηΩb 2 ( â†σ̂+e iδbt + âσ̂−e −iδbt ) .”
Quantum Fluctuation Theorems for Arbitrary Environments: Adiabatic and Nonadiabatic Entropy Production (2017, methodology): “Particularizing this expression to certain initial conditions of the backward process, one can obtain FT’s for the change of inclusive (14) and exclusive (15) entropy production, i.e., for the entropy production that results from keeping or neglecting the classical correlations generated between the”