Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Temperature determines the relative probability of observing a physical system in an energy state when that system is energetically in equilibrium with its environment. In this paper we present a theory for engineering the temperature of a quantum system different from its ambient temperature. We define criteria for an engineered quantum bath that, when coupled to a quantum system with Hamiltonian $H$, drives the system to the equilibrium state $\frac{{e}^{\ensuremath{-}H/T}}{\mathrm{Tr}({e}^{\ensuremath{-}H/T})}$ with a tunable parameter $T$. This is basically an analog counterpart of the digital quantum metropolis algorithm. For a system of superconducting qubits, we propose a circuit-QED approximate realization of such an engineered thermal bath consisting of driven lossy resonators. Our proposal opens the path to simulate thermodynamical properties of many-body quantum systems of size not accessible to classical simulations. Also we discuss how an artificial thermal bath can serve as a temperature knob for a hybrid quantum-thermal annealer.
Source: Physical Review A
Authors: Alireza Shabani, Hartmut Neven
Institution: Google (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2548795304