Abstract
Estimating the temperature of a cold quantum system is difficult. Usually one measures a well-understood thermal state and uses that prior knowledge to infer its temperature. In contrast, we introduce a method of thermometry that assumes minimal knowledge of the state of a system and is potentially nondestructive. Our method uses a universal temperature dependence of the quench dynamics of an initially thermal system coupled to a qubit probe that follows from the Tasaki-Crooks theorem for nonequilibrium work distributions. We provide examples for a cold-atom system, in which our thermometry protocol may retain accuracy and precision at subnano-Kelvin temperatures.
- Received 21 September 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.93.053619
©2016 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Atomic, Molecular & Optical
