Experimentally probing Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates Landauer's principle within a quantum many-body system using ultracold Bose gases, revealing the interplay of thermodynamics and quantum information during out-of-equilibrium processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates the first experimental probing of Landauer's principle in a quantum field theoretical setting with ultracold atoms, combining dynamical tomography and quantum thermodynamics analysis.

Findings

Verification of quantum field theoretical calculations

Observation of entropy production contributions

Demonstration of ultracold atom quantum simulators for thermodynamics

Abstract

Landauer's principle bridges information theory and thermodynamics by linking the entropy change of a system during a process to the average energy dissipated to its environment. Although typically discussed in the context of erasing a single bit of information, Landauer's principle can be generalised to characterise irreversibility in out-of-equilibrium processes, such as those involving complex quantum many-body systems. Specifically, the relationship between the entropy change of the system and the energy dissipated to its environment can be decomposed into changes in quantum mutual information and a difference in relative entropies of the environment. Here we experimentally probe Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime using a quantum field simulator of ultracold Bose gases. Employing a dynamical tomographic reconstruction scheme, we track the temporal evolution of the quantum field following a global mass quench from a massive to massless Klein-Gordon model and analyse the thermodynamic and information-theoretic contributions to a generalised entropy production for various system-environment partitions of the composite system. Our results verify the quantum field theoretical calculations, interpreted using a semi-classical quasiparticle picture. Our work demonstrates the ability of ultracold atom-based quantum field simulators to experimentally investigate quantum thermodynamics.