Freiburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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FM: Fall Meeting

FM 58: Quantum Information Concepts in Thermodynamics

FM 58.2: Talk

Mittwoch, 25. September 2019, 14:30–14:45, 3042

Coherence and catalysis in the Jaynes-Cummings model — •Anette Messinger, Atirach Ritboon, Frances Crimin, Sarah Croke, and Stephen M. Barnett — School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, United Kingdom

Coherence is a crucial principle of quantum physics describing the difference between a quantum superposition and a classical statistical mixture. Like energy and entanglement, it can be described as a resource. In particular the creation of superposition in the energy basis and its impact on quantum thermodynamics received a lot of attention in recent years. It has been suggested that coherence can be created catalytically, that is without degrading the resource state which is used in the process [1]. This idea runs into difficulties, however, when taking correlations into account [2].

Here we study the repeated interaction of a cavity field initialized in a coherent state with a sequence of two-level atoms in the Jaynes-Cummings model and ask the question to what extent the production of atomic superposition states is catalytic in this setup. We investigate the degradation of coherence in the cavity during multiple rounds and show that the process is much more robust against failure than the original proposal of catalytic coherence [1] and correlations only have a small effect on the overall efficiency. We furthermore study the role of squeezing in the cavity and give an analytic expression for the ideal squeezing strength.

[1] Åberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 150402 (2014), [2] Vaccaro et al., J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 51, 414008 (2018)