Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Work extraction by homodyne measurement and cross-Kerr nonlinearity in quantum optical setups

Avijit Misra

Weizmann Institute, Israel

In this talk, I will elucidate the rapport of work and information in the
context of a minimal quantum mechanical setup, specifically, about a
converter of heat to work wherein the input consists of a single oscillator
mode prepared in a hot thermal state along with few colder
oscillator modes. Extraction of work by observation and feedforward (WOF)
that only measures a small fraction of the input, is clearly advantageous
to the conceivable alternatives will be shown. Along this line, the
efficiencies of work extraction for different, generic, measurement
strategies (homodyne, photocount) and a reversible scheme will be
compared. One of the main drawbacks of work extraction by measurement is it
inevitably requires feedforward and outcome dependent control steps. To
circumvent this, we propose an autonomous, coherent work extraction method
exploiting non-linear cross-Kerr interaction.


References: Phys. Rev. Lett. 127 (4), 040602 (2021); Phys. Rev. E 106 (5),
054131 (2022); Science Advances 9 (1), eadf1070 (2023), Entropy (submitted)