Speaker
Prof.
Amir O. Caldeira
(Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil)
Description
Over the past several decades, a rich series of experiments
has repeatedly verified the quantum nature of
superconducting devices, leading some of these systems to
be regarded as artificial atoms. In addition to their
application in quantum information processing, these
`atoms' provide a test bed for studying quantum mechanics
in macroscopic limits. Regarding the last point, we present
here a feasible protocol for directly testing time reversal
symmetry in a superconducting artificial atom. Time
reversal symmetry is a fundamental property of quantum
mechanics and is expected to hold if the dynamics of the
artificial atom strictly follow the Schroedinger equation.
However, this property has yet to be tested in any
macroscopic quantum systems. The test we propose is
based on the verification of the microreversibility principle,
which on top of its own importance, provides us with a
viable approach to verifying quantum work fluctuation
theorems - an outstanding challenge in quantum statistical
mechanics. For this, we outline a procedure that utilizes the
microreversibility test in conjunction with numerical
emulations of Gibbs ensembles to verify these theorems
over a large temperature range.
