Work Generation from Thermal Noise by Quantum Phase-Sensitive Observation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a quantum protocol for extracting work from thermal noise using phase-sensitive measurements, demonstrating efficiency improvements over traditional heat engines.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining homodyne detection and unitary operations for work extraction from thermal noise, surpassing existing models.

Findings

Work extraction efficiency increases with input quanta, detector efficiency, and inverse temperature.

The protocol outperforms traditional information and heat engine models.

Effective for thermal noise with more than one quantum on average.

Abstract

We put forward the concept of work extraction from thermal noise by phase-sensitive (homodyne) measurements of the noisy input followed by (outcome-dependent) unitary manipulations of the post-measured state. For optimized measurements, noise input with more than one quantum on average is shown to yield heat-to-work conversion with efficiency and power that grow with the mean number of input quanta, detector efficiency and its inverse temperature. This protocol is shown to be advantageous compared to common models of information and heat engines.