Measuring work and heat in ultracold quantum gases

Measuring work and heat in ultracold quantum gases

Blog Article

We propose a feasible experimental scheme to direct measure heat and work in cold atomic setups.The method is based on a recent proposal which shows that work is a positive operator Balms valued measure (POVM).In the present contribution, we demonstrate that the interaction between the atoms and the light polarization of a probe laser allows us to implement such POVM.In this way the work done on or extracted from the Collections atoms after a given process is encoded in the light quadrature that can be measured with a standard homodyne detection.The protocol allows one to verify fluctuation theorems and study properties of the non-unitary dynamics of a given thermodynamic process.