Thursday, December 27, 2012

1212.5808 (Jukka P. Pekola et al.)

Calorimetric measurement of quantum work    [PDF]

Jukka P. Pekola, Paolo Solinas, Alexander Shnirman, Dmitri V. Averin
To define the work performed on a driven quantum system in a physically sound way has turned out to be a truly non-trivial task, except in some special cases of limited applicability. This topic has been in a focus of intense research recently in the attempts to generalize the classical fluctuation relations into the quantum regime. Here we propose and demonstrate that a calorimetric measurement gives both a theoretical and experimental tool to test the Jarzynski equality (JE) and other fluctuation relations in a quantum system, and to analyze the distribution of dissipation in them, based on the very principle of conservation of energy. We focus on an experimentally feasible two-level system, a superconducting Cooper pair box subject to Landau-Zener interband transitions. Because of the small heat capacity and weak relaxation to the phonon bath, the calorimetric measurement on the electron gas (resistor) turns out to be a very feasible experimental method.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5808

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