Experimental simulation of daemonic work extraction in open quantum batteries on a digital quantum computer

The possibility of extracting more work from a physical system thanks to information obtained from measurements has been a topic of fundamental interest in thermodynamics since the formulation of Maxwell’s demon. We consider this problem from the perspective of an open quantum battery interacting with a continuously measured environment. By modeling the dynamics with a continuously monitored collisional model, we implement it as a quantum circuit, including the final conditional feedback unitary evolution that enhances the extracted work. Exploiting IBM quantum computers and carefully modeling the circuit, we experimentally simulate the protocol and show that the measured daemonic extracted work approaches its theoretical upper bound, the daemonic ergotropy. We further demonstrate that modeling circuit noise enables improvement of the protocol by optimizing the feedback extraction unitary.

Quantum Science and Technology 10, 025017