Demonstration of irreversibility and dissipation relation of thermodynamics with a superconducting qubit

TL;DR

This paper experimentally explores the connection between thermodynamic irreversibility and dissipation in a superconducting qubit, confirming theoretical predictions and illustrating fundamental principles like the second law and Landauer's principle.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental verification of the relation between irreversibility and dissipation in quantum thermodynamics using a superconducting qubit.

Findings

Irreversibility correlates with average work dissipation.

Relative entropy measures irreversibility in quantum processes.

Experimental support for quantum thermodynamics theory.

Abstract

We investigate experimentally the relation between thermodynamical irreversibility and dissipation on a superconducting Xmon qubit. This relation also implies the second law and the Landauer principle on dissipation in the irreversible computations. In our experiment, the qubit is initialized to states according to Gibbs distribution. Work injection and extraction processes are conducted through two kinds of unitary driving protocols, for both a forward process and its corresponding mirror reverses. Relative entropy and relative Re'nyi entropy are employed to measure the asymmetry between paired forward and backward work injection or extraction processes. We show experimentally that relative entropy and relative Re'nyi entropy measured irreversibility are related to the average of work dissipation and average of exponentiated work dissipation respectively. Our work provides solid experimental support for the theory of quantum thermodynamics.