Speaker: Gabriele De Chiara, Queen's University Belfast

Title: How much work?

Abstract:

The concept of work in thermodynamics is well known and can be well defined in a process in which a property of the system (the position of a piston, the strength of a field) changes from an initial to a final value.

In quantum mechanics it has been recently realised that work cannot be associated with the expectation value of an observable but rather with the transition probabilities between energy eigenstates [1]. As a consequence, only the work probability distribution can be properly defined for a given process. 

In this seminar I will first revise the recent developments concerning the definition of work in quantum mechanics. Then I will discuss a proposal, based on Ramsey interferometry, for measuring the work probability distribution in an experiment. Although our proposal can be adapted to most quantum technologies, I will explicitly discuss one example based on an optomechanical setup.

[1] M. Campisi, P. Haenggi and P. Talkner, Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 771 (2011).
[2] L. Mazzola, G. De Chiara and M. Paternostro, arxiv:1301.7030 

Coffee/tea and cake will be served at 10:00