Experimental study on the principle of minimal work fluctuations

2023/10/23 by Cheng, Wei, Liu, Wenquan, Wu, Yang +5 · 1 citation
#FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.14461

Abstract

The central quantity in the celebrated quantum Jarzynski equality is e^-βW, where W is work and β is the inverse temperature. The impact of quantum randomness on the fluctuations of e^-βW and hence on the predictive power of the Jarzynski estimator is an important problem. Working on a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond and riding on an implementation of two-point measurement of non-equilibrium work with single-shot readout, we have conducted a direct experimental investigation of the relationship between the fluctuations of e^-βW and adiabaticity of non-equilibrium work protocols. It is observed that adiabatic processes minimize the variance of e^-βW, thus verifying an early theoretical concept, the so-called principle of minimal work fluctuations. Furthermore, it is experimentally demonstrated that shortcuts-to-adiabaticity control can be exploited to minimize the variance of e^-βW in fast work protocols. Our work should stimulate further experimental studies of quantum effects on the bias and error in the estimates of free energy differences based on the Jarzynski equality.

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