Understanding and controlling microscopic quantum devices represents a major milestone. Their precision is related to the fluctuations of their measurable output, an aspect that becomes preponderant at the nano-scale. Achieving a regime where the machine operates at a given reliability/precision inevitably comes at a cost in terms of thermodynamic resources, such as dissipated heat or excess work, thus massively impacting the machines’ performances.
Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relations (TURs) have represented a landmark first step in understanding this balance, as they express a trade-off between precision, defined as the noise-to-signal ratio of a generic current, and the amount of associated entropy production. These results have deep consequences for quantum thermal machines, imposing an upper bound for their efficiency in terms of the power yield and its fluctuations. Such engines can be divided into two classes: steady-state heat engines and periodically driven heat engines. In this talk I will present and discuss the derivation of genuinely quantum corrections to TURs in both cases, which were obtained by combining techniques from quantum information theory and thermodynamics of geometry. Finally, I will report on an experimental measurement of such quantum correction in a trapped-ion experiment.

Contact: Dragi Karevski