Local quantum thermal susceptibility

Thermodynamics relies on the possibility to describe systems composed of a large number of constituents in terms of few macroscopic variables. Its foundations are rooted into the paradigm of statistical mechanics, where thermal properties originate from averaging procedures which smoothen out local...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2016-09, Vol.7 (1), p.12782-12782, Article 12782
Main Authors: De Pasquale, Antonella, Rossini, Davide, Fazio, Rosario, Giovannetti, Vittorio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/766/483/1255
639/766/483/481
639/766/530/951
Equilibrium
Heat
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
Phase transitions
Random variables
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Temperature
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Summary:Thermodynamics relies on the possibility to describe systems composed of a large number of constituents in terms of few macroscopic variables. Its foundations are rooted into the paradigm of statistical mechanics, where thermal properties originate from averaging procedures which smoothen out local details. While undoubtedly successful, elegant and formally correct, this approach carries over an operational problem, namely determining the precision at which such variables are inferred, when technical/practical limitations restrict our capabilities to local probing. Here we introduce the local quantum thermal susceptibility, a quantifier for the best achievable accuracy for temperature estimation via local measurements. Our method relies on basic concepts of quantum estimation theory, providing an operative strategy to address the local thermal response of arbitrary quantum systems at equilibrium. At low temperatures, it highlights the local distinguishability of the ground state from the excited sub-manifolds, thus providing a method to locate quantum phase transitions. In thermodynamics, thermal properties of systems are obtained from averaging procedures which smooth out local details. Here, the authors introduce the concept of local quantum thermal susceptibility, a measure for the best achievable accuracy of estimation of temperature via local measurements.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/ncomms12782