Apparent Heating due to Imperfect Calorimetric Measurements

TL;DR

This paper investigates how imperfect calorimetric measurements, especially noise, affect the observed energy exchange and apparent heating in quantum systems, revealing that noise can alter system dynamics and measurement outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a model for imperfect calorimetric measurements, showing how noise modifies jump rates and leads to apparent heating effects in quantum systems.

Findings

Noise bath modifies jump rates in system dynamics.

Increasing noise reduces power flow from system to calorimeter.

Noise causes an apparent heating effect in calorimetric measurements.

Abstract

Performing imperfect or noisy measurements on a quantum system both impacts the measurement outcome and the state of the system after the measurement. In this paper we are concerned with imperfect calorimetric measurements. In calorimetric measurements one typically measures the energy of a thermal environment to extract information about the system. The measurement is imperfect in the sense that we simultaneously measure the energy of the calorimeter and an additional noise bath. Under weak coupling assumptions, we find that the presence of the noise bath manifests itself by modifying the jump rates of the reduced system dynamics. We study an example of a driven qubit interacting with resonant bosons calorimeter and find increasing the noise leads to a reduction in the power flowing from qubit to calorimeter and thus an apparent heating up of the calorimeter.