Quantum Energy Teleportation between Spin Particles in a Gibbs State

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that quantum energy teleportation between spin particles in a Gibbs state is possible at any temperature, showing that quantum correlations other than entanglement, such as dissonance, can serve as resources for energy transfer.

Contribution

It reveals that quantum energy teleportation can occur without entanglement, highlighting the role of dissonance as a quantum resource in thermal states.

Findings

Energy teleportation occurs at all temperatures, even where entanglement is absent.

Quantum dissonance correlates with increased energy transfer.

A temperature threshold exists below which local energy extraction is impossible.

Abstract

Energy in a multipartite quantum system appears from an operational perspective to be distributed to some extent non-locally because of correlations extant among the system's components. This non-locality allows users to transfer, in effect, locally accessible energy between sites of different system components by LOCC (local operations and classical communication). Quantum energy teleportation is a three-step LOCC protocol, accomplished without an external energy carrier, for effectively transferring energy between two physically separated, but correlated, sites. We apply this LOCC teleportation protocol to a model Heisenberg spin particle pair initially in a quantum thermal Gibbs state, making temperature an explicit parameter. We find in this setting that energy teleportation is possible at any temperature, even at temperatures above the threshold where the particles' entanglement vanishes. This shows for Gibbs spin states that entanglement is not fundamentally necessary for energy teleportation; correlation other than entanglement can suffice. Dissonance---quantum correlation in separable states---is in this regard shown to be a quantum resource for energy teleportation, more dissonance being consistently associated with greater energy yield. We compare energy teleportation from particle A to B in Gibbs states with direct local energy extraction by a general quantum operation on B and find a temperature threshold below which energy extraction by a local operation is impossible. This threshold delineates essentially two regimes: a high temperature regime where entanglement vanishes and the teleportation generated by other quantum correlations yields only vanishingly little energy relative to local extraction and a second low-temperature teleportation regime where energy is available at B only by teleportation.