Sequential-measurement thermometry with quantum many-body probes

Abstract

Measuring the temperature of a quantum system is an essential task in almost all aspects of quantum technologies. Theoretically, an optimal strategy for thermometry often requires measuring energy, which demands full accessibility over the entire system as well as a complex entangled measurement basis. In this paper, we take a different approach and show that single-qubit sequential measurements in the computational basis not only allow for precise thermometry of a many-body system, but may also achieve precision beyond the thermometry capacity of the probe at equilibrium, given by the Cramér-Rao bound. Thus, using consecutive single-qubit measurements of the probe out of equilibrium is, in most cases, very beneficial, as it achieves lower-temperature uncertainties and avoids demanding energy measurements when compared with probes at thermal equilibrium. To obtain such precision, the time between the two subsequent measurements should be smaller than the thermalization time so that the probe never thermalizes. Therefore, the nonequilibrium dynamics of the system continuously imprint information about temperature in the state of the probe. To demonstrate the generality of our findings, we consider thermometry in both spin chains and the Jaynes-Cummings model.