Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Simulating a quantum heat engine on transmon qubits

Presenting Author: Nicholas Materise, Colorado School of Mines
Contributing Author(s): Eliot Kapit, Colorado School of Mines

We devise a scheme to simulate a quantum heat engine using in an array of flux-tunable transmon qubits. This device provides a one-to-one mapping to a fixed nearest-neighbor coupled, disordered Bose-Hubbard model, with precision control over transitions between the many body localized (MBL) phase and the thermal or superfluid phase [Nature 566, 51 (2019)]. Our approach expands on a previous MBL engine proposal [Phys.Rev.B 99, 024203 (2019)], where the adiabatic strokes involve transitions between the two nondegenerate ground states and first excited states of the MBL and thermal phases. We expect that this choice of energy levels reduces the likelihood of excursions to higher levels, especially in the case of the ground states, serving as a prototype for future investigations into studies of MBL as a thermodynamic resource.

(Session 5 : Saturday from 5:00pm - 7:00pm)