Tunable photonic heat transport in a quantum heat valve

Alberto Ronzani*, Bayan Karimi, Jorden Senior, Yu Cheng Chang, Joonas T. Peltonen, Chii Dong Chen, Jukka P. Pekola

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

185 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Quantum thermodynamics is emerging both as a topic of fundamental research and as a means to understand and potentially improve the performance of quantum devices 1–10 . A prominent platform for achieving the necessary manipulation of quantum states is superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) 11 . In this platform, thermalization of a quantum system 12–15 can be achieved by interfacing the circuit QED subsystem with a thermal reservoir of appropriate Hilbert dimensionality. Here we study heat transport through an assembly consisting of a superconducting qubit 16 capacitively coupled between two nominally identical coplanar waveguide resonators, each equipped with a heat reservoir in the form of a normal-metal mesoscopic resistor termination. We report the observation of tunable photonic heat transport through the resonator–qubit–resonator assembly, showing that the reservoir-to-reservoir heat flux depends on the interplay between the qubit–resonator and the resonator–reservoir couplings, yielding qualitatively dissimilar results in different coupling regimes. Our quantum heat valve is relevant for the realization of quantum heat engines 17 and refrigerators, which can be obtained, for example, by exploiting the time-domain dynamics and coherence of driven superconducting qubits 18,19 . This effort would ultimately bridge the gap between the fields of quantum information and thermodynamics of mesoscopic systems.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)991-995
JournalNature Physics
Volume14
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2018
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

This work was funded through Academy of Finland grants 297240, 312057 and 303677 and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the European Research Council (ERC) programme and Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (grant agreements 742559 and 766025).

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