Extracting and charging energy into almost unknown quantum states

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Canzio, Andrea, Cavina, Vasco, Menta, Roberto, Giovannetti, Vittorio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914031779971072
author Canzio, Andrea
Cavina, Vasco
Menta, Roberto
Giovannetti, Vittorio
author_facet Canzio, Andrea
Cavina, Vasco
Menta, Roberto
Giovannetti, Vittorio
contents In this work, we investigate the amount of energy that can be extracted or charged through unitary operations when only minimal information about the state is known. Assuming knowledge of only the mean energy of the state, we start by developing optimal upper bounds for the work that can be unitarily extracted or charged in this scenario. In deriving these upper bounds, we provide a complete characterization of the minimum ergotropy and anti-ergotropy for density matrices with fixed average energy, showing that the minimum states are always passive or antipassive and the problem of finding them can be mapped to a simple linear programming algorithm. Furthermore, we show that these lower bounds directly translate into upper bounds for the energy-constrained coherent ergotropy and anti-ergotropy of a state. We continue by illustrating scenarios in which these bounds can be saturated: a simple unitary protocol is shown to saturate the bounds for relevant classes of Hamiltonians, while having access to decoherence or randomness as resources, the saturation is guaranteed for all Hamiltonians. Finally, by taking a qutrit as an example, we show and compare the performances of the various protocols identified.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_08899
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extracting and charging energy into almost unknown quantum states
Canzio, Andrea
Cavina, Vasco
Menta, Roberto
Giovannetti, Vittorio
Quantum Physics
In this work, we investigate the amount of energy that can be extracted or charged through unitary operations when only minimal information about the state is known. Assuming knowledge of only the mean energy of the state, we start by developing optimal upper bounds for the work that can be unitarily extracted or charged in this scenario. In deriving these upper bounds, we provide a complete characterization of the minimum ergotropy and anti-ergotropy for density matrices with fixed average energy, showing that the minimum states are always passive or antipassive and the problem of finding them can be mapped to a simple linear programming algorithm. Furthermore, we show that these lower bounds directly translate into upper bounds for the energy-constrained coherent ergotropy and anti-ergotropy of a state. We continue by illustrating scenarios in which these bounds can be saturated: a simple unitary protocol is shown to saturate the bounds for relevant classes of Hamiltonians, while having access to decoherence or randomness as resources, the saturation is guaranteed for all Hamiltonians. Finally, by taking a qutrit as an example, we show and compare the performances of the various protocols identified.
title Extracting and charging energy into almost unknown quantum states
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08899