Low-control and robust quantum refrigerator and applications with electronic spins in diamond

We propose a general protocol for low-control refrigeration and thermometry of thermal qubits, which can be implemented using electronic spins in diamond. The refrigeration is implemented by a probe, consisting of a network of interacting spins. The protocol involves two operations: (i) free evolution of the probe; and (ii) a swap gate between one spin in the probe and the thermal qubit we wish to cool. We show that if the initial state of the probe falls within a suitable range, and the free evolution of the probe is both unital and conserves the excitation in the $z$-direction, then the cooling protocol will always succeed, with an efficiency that depends on the rate of spin dephasing and the swap gate fidelity. Furthermore, measuring the probe after it has cooled many qubits provides an estimate of their temperature. We provide a specific example where the probe is a Heisenberg spin chain, and suggest a physical implementation using electronic spins in diamond. Here the probe is constituted of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, while the thermal qubits are dark spins. By using a novel pulse sequence, a chain of NV centers can be made to evolve according to a Heisenberg Hamiltonian. This proposal allows for a range of applications, such as NV-based nuclear magnetic resonance of photosensitive molecules kept in a dark spot on a sample, and it opens up possibilities for the study of quantum thermodynamics, environment-assisted sensing, and many-body physics

Quantum sensing of temperature close to absolute zero in a Bose-Einstein condensate

We propose a theoretical scheme for quantum sensing of temperature close to absolute zero in a quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In our scheme, a single-atom impurity qubit is used as a temper-ature sensor. We investigate the sensitivity of the single-atom sensor in estimating the temperature of the BEC. We demonstrate that the sensitivity of the temperature sensor can saturate the quantum Cramer-Rao bound by means of measuring quantum coherence of the probe qubit. We study the temperature sensing performance by the use of quantum signal-to-noise ratio (QSNR). It is indicated that there is an optimal encoding time that the QSNR can reach its maximum in the full-temperature regime. In particular, we find that the QSNR reaches a finite upper bound in the weak coupling regime even when the temperature is close to absolute zero, which implies that the sensing-error-divergence problem is avoided in our scheme. Our work opens a way for quantum sensing of temperature close to absolute zero in the BEC.Comment: 9 pages,9 figure

Quantum Probes for Ohmic Environments at Thermal Equilibrium

It is often the case that the environment of a quantum system may be described as a bath of oscillators with Ohmic density of states. In turn, the precise characterization of these classes of environments is a crucial tool to engineer decoherence or to tailor quantum information protocols. Recently, the use of quantum probes in characterizing Ohmic environments at zero-temperature has been discussed, showing that a single qubit provides precise estimation of the cutoff frequency. On the other hand, thermal noise often spoil quantum probing schemes, and for this reason we here extend the analysis to complex system at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we discuss the interplay between thermal fluctuations and time evolution in determining the precision {attainable by} quantum probes. Our results show that the presence of thermal fluctuations degrades the precision for low values of the cutoff frequency, i.e. values of the order $\omega_c \lesssim T$ (in natural units). For larger values of $\omega_c$ decoherence is mostly due to the structure of environment, rather than thermal fluctuations, such that quantum probing by a single qubit is still an effective estimation procedure.Comment: Entropy, special issue on Open Quantum Systems (OQS) for quantum technologies (S. Lorenzo and M. G. Palma, Eds

Temperature-heat uncertainty relation for quantum thermometry

We investigate the resource theory for temperature estimation. We demonstrate that it is the fluctuation of heat that fundamentally determines temperature precision through the temperature-heat uncertainty relation. Specifically, we find that heat is divided into trajectory heat and correlation heat, which are associated with the heat exchange along thermometer's evolution path and the correlation between the thermometer and the sample, respectively. Based on two type of thermometers, we show that both of these heat terms are resources for enhancing temperature precision. Additionally, we demonstrate that the temperature-heat uncertainty relation is consistent with the well known temperature-energy uncertainty relation in thermodynamics. By clearly distinguishing the resources for enhancing estimation precision, our findings not only explain why various quantum features are crucial for accurate temperature sensing but also provide valuable insights for designing ultrahigh-sensitive quantum thermometers.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Criticality-Enhanced Precision in Phase Thermometry

Temperature estimation of interacting quantum many-body systems is both a challenging task and topic of interest in quantum metrology, given that critical behavior at phase transitions can boost the metrological sensitivity. Here we study non-invasive quantum thermometry of a finite, two-dimensional Ising spin lattice based on measuring the non-Markovian dephasing dynamics of a spin probe coupled to the lattice. We demonstrate a strong critical enhancement of the achievable precision in terms of the quantum Fisher information, which depends on the coupling range and the interrogation time. Our numerical simulations are compared to instructive analytic results for the critical scaling of the sensitivity in the Curie-Weiss model of a fully connected lattice and to the mean-field description in the thermodynamic limit, both of which fail to describe the critical spin fluctuations on the lattice the spin probe is sensitive to. Phase metrology could thus help to investigate the critical behaviour of finite many-body systems beyond the validity of mean-field models.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Quantum metrology out of equilibrium

We address open quantum systems out-of-equilibrium as effective quantum probes for the characterisation of their environment. We discuss estimation schemes for parameters driving a de-phasing evolution of the probe and then focus on qubits, establishing a relationship between the quantum Fisher information and the residual coherence of the probe. Finally, we apply our results to the characterisation of the ohmicity parameter of a bosonic environment

Quantum Limits of Thermometry

The precision of typical thermometers consisting of $N$ particles is shot noise limited, improving as $\sim1/\sqrt{N}$. For high precision thermometry and thermometric standards this presents an important theoretical noise floor. Here it is demonstrated that thermometry may be mapped onto the problem of phase estimation, and using techniques from optimal phase estimation, it follows that the scaling of the precision of a thermometer may in principle be improved to $\sim1/N$, representing a Heisenberg limit to thermometry.Comment: 4 page

In situ thermometry of a cold Fermi gas via dephasing impurities

The precise measurement of low temperatures is a challenging, important and fundamental task for quantum science. In particular, in-situ thermometry is highly desirable for cold atomic systems due to their potential for quantum simulation. Here we demonstrate that the temperature of a non-interacting Fermi gas can be accurately inferred from the non-equilibrium dynamics of impurities immersed within it, using an interferometric protocol and established experimental methods. Adopting tools from the theory of quantum parameter estimation, we show that our proposed scheme achieves optimal precision in the relevant temperature regime for degenerate Fermi gases in current experiments. We also discover an intriguing trade-off between measurement time and thermometric precision that is controlled by the impurity-gas coupling, with weak coupling leading to the greatest sensitivities. This is explained as a consequence of the slow decoherence associated with the onset of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe, which dominates the gas dynamics following its local interaction with the immersed impurity.Comment: 6+5 pages, 4+4 figures. Final author versio