arXiv subjects

F. Benatti

Publications and source records attributed to F. Benatti.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Cluster property and Bell's inequalities

Among the many loopholes that might be invoked to reconcile local realism with the experimental violations of Bell's inequalities, the space-dependence of the correlation functions appears particularly relevant for its connections with the so-called cluster property, one of the basic ingredient of axiomatic quantum field theory. The property states that the expectation values of products of observables supported within space-like separated space-time regions factorize. Actually, in some massive models the factorization is exponentially fast with respect to the distance between the systems possibly involved in actual experiments. It is then often argued that considering the space dependence of the quantities involved in the Bell's like inequalities would eventually not violate them and thus support the reproducibility of the quantum behaviour by a suitable local hidden variable model. In this note, we show when this is actually the case and how non-local effects can still be visible.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

A quantum fluctuation description of charge qubits

We consider a specific instance of a superconducting circuit, the so-called charge-qubit, consisting of a capacitor and a Josephson junction. Starting from the microscopic description of the latter in terms of two tunneling BCS models in the strong-coupling quasi-spin formulation, we derive the Hamiltonian governing the quantum behavior of the circuit in the limit of a large number $N$ of quasi-spins. Our approach relies on the identification of suitable quantum fluctuations, i.e. of collective quasi-spin operators, which account for the presence of fluctuation operators in the superconducting phase that retain a quantum character in spite of the large-$N$ limit. We show indeed that these collective quantum fluctuations generate the Heisenberg algebra on the circle and that their dynamics reproduces the one of the quantized charge-qubit, without the need of a phenomenological ``third quantization'' of a semiclassically inspired model. As a byproduct of our derivation, we explicitly obtain the temperature dependence of the junction critical Josephson current in the strong coupling regime, a result which is not directly accessible using standard approximation techniques.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Local generation of entanglement with Redfield dynamics

In phenomenological applications, time evolutions of Bloch-Redfield type are widely adopted for modelling open system dynamics, despite their non-positive preserving character: this physical inconsistency, that in general shows up at small times, is usually cured by suitably restricting the space of allowed initial states. Nevertheless, additional problems may arise in relation to entanglement: specifically, we show that Redfield dynamics can generate entanglement through a purely local action, and this unphysical effect can persist for finite times.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Temperature in Nonequilibrium Quantum Systems

We extend on ideas from standard thermodynamics to show that temperature can be assigned to a general nonequilibrium quantum system. By choosing a physically motivated complete set of observables and expanding the system state thereupon, one can read a set of relevant, independent thermodynamic variables which include internal energy. This expansion allows us to read a nonequilibrium temperature as the partial derivative of the von Neumann entropy with respect to internal energy. We show that this definition of temperature is one of a set of thermodynamics parameters unambiguously describing the system state. It has appealing features such as positivity for passive states and consistency with the standard temperature for thermal states. By attributing temperature to correlations in a bipartite system, we obtain a universal relation which connects the temperatures of subsystems, total system as a whole, and correlation. All these temperatures can be different even when the composite system is in a well-defined Gibbsian thermal state.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Entanglement in indistinguishable particle systems

For systems consisting of distinguishable particles, there exists an agreed upon notion of entanglement which is fundamentally based on the possibility of addressing individually each one of the constituent parties. Instead, the indistinguishability of identical particles hinders their individual addressability and has prompted diverse, sometimes discordant definitions of entanglement. In the present review, we provide a comparative analysis of the relevant existing approaches, which is based on the characterization of bipartite entanglement in terms of the behaviour of correlation functions. Such a a point of view provides a fairly general setting where to discuss the presence of non-local effects; it is performed in the light of the following general consistency criteria: i) entanglement corresponds to non-local correlations and cannot be generated by local operations; ii) when, by "freezing" suitable degrees of freedom, identical particles can be effectively distinguished, their entanglement must reduce to the one that holds for distinguishable particles; iii) in absence of other quantum resources, only entanglement can outperform classical information protocols. These three requests provide a setting that allows to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the existing approaches to indistinguishable particle entanglement and to contribute to the current understanding of such a crucial issue. Indeed, they can be classified into five different classes: four hinging on the notion of particle and one based on that of physical modes. We show that only the latter approach is consistent with all three criteria, each of the others indeed violating at least one of them.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quantum detailed balance conditions and fluctuation relations for thermalizing quantum dynamics

Quantum detailed balance conditions and quantum fluctuation relations are two important concepts in the dynamics of open quantum systems: both concern how such systems behave when they thermalize because of interaction with an environment. We prove that for thermalizing quantum dynamics the quantum detailed balance conditions yield the validity of a quantum fluctuation relation (where only forward-time dynamics is considered). This implies that to have such a quantum fluctuation relation (which in turn enables a precise formulation of the second law of thermodynamics for quantum systems) it suffices to fulfill the quantum detailed balance conditions. We, however, show that the converse is not necessarily true; indeed, there are cases of thermalizing dynamics which feature the quantum fluctuation relation without satisfying detailed balance. We illustrate our results with three examples.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Noisy effects in interferometric quantum gravity tests

Quantum-enhanced metrology is boosting interferometer sensitivities to extraordinary levels, up to the point where table-top experiments have been proposed to measure Planck-scale effects predicted by quantum gravity theories. In setups involving multiple photon interferometers, as those for measuring the so-called holographic fluctuations, entanglement provides substantial improvements in sensitivity. Entanglement is however a fragile resource and may be endangered by decoherence phenomena. We analyze how noisy effects arising either from the weak coupling to an external environment or from the modification of the canonical commutation relations in photon propagation may affect this entanglement enhanced gain in sensitivity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Bound on dissipative effects from semileptonic neutral B-meson decays

The semileptonic decay asymmetry $\mathcal{A}_{Δm}$ is studied within the open quantum systems approach to the physics of the neutral meson $B^0$-$\overline{B^0}$ system: this extended treatment takes into account possible non-standard, dissipative effects induced by the presence of an external environment. A bound on these effects is provided through the analysis of available experimental data from the Belle Collaboration.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2017

Remarks on entanglement and identical particles

We argue that in the case of identical particles the most natural identification of separability, that is of absence of non-classical correlations, is via the factorization of mean values of commuting observables. It thus follows that separability and entanglement depend both on the state and on the choice of observables and are not absolute notions. We compare this point of view with a recent novel approach to the entanglement of identical particles, which allows for the definition of an entanglement entropy from a suitably defined reduced particle density matrix, without the need of labeling the system constituents. We contrast this figure of merit with the aforementioned lack of an absolute notion of entanglement by considering few paradigmatic examples.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Entropy production and non-Markovian dynamical maps

In the weak-coupling limit approach to open quantum systems, the presence of the bath is eliminated and accounted for by a master equation that introduces dissipative contributions to the system reduced dynamics. Within this framework, there are no bath entropy contributions to the entropy balance. We show that, as a consequence, the entropy production fails to be positive for a class of physically legitimate (i.e., completely positive and trace preserving) non-Markovian dynamical maps. Moreover, in the absence of the semigroup property, if the reduced dynamics has a thermal asymptotic state, this need not be stationary. In this case, even the integrated entropy production becomes negative. These observations imply that, when the conditions leading to reduced dynamics of semigroup type are relaxed, a consistent formulation of the second law of thermodynamics requires that the environment contribution to the entropy balance be explicitly taken into account.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Quantum Fluctuations in Mesoscopic Systems

Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging classicality is expected. This behaviour hinges on collective observables, named quantum fluctuations, that retain a quantum character even in the thermodynamic limit: they provide useful tools for studying properties of many-body systems at the mesoscopic level, in between the quantum microscopic scale and the classical macroscopic one. We hereby present the general theory of quantum fluctuations in mesoscopic systems and study their dynamics in a quantum open system setting, taking into account the unavoidable effects of dissipation and noise induced by the external environment. As in the case of microscopic systems, decoherence is not always the only dominating effect at the mesoscopic scale: certain type of environments can provide means for entangling collective fluctuations through a purely noisy mechanism.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Long-lived mesoscopic entanglement between two damped infinite harmonic chains

We consider two chains, each made of $N$ independent oscillators, immersed in a common thermal bath and study the dynamics of their mutual quantum correlations in the thermodynamic, large-$N$ limit. We show that dissipation and noise due to the presence of the external environment are able to generate collective quantum correlations between the two chains at the mesoscopic level. The created collective quantum entanglement between the two many-body systems turns out to be rather robust, surviving for asymptotically long times even for non vanishing bath temperatures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Correlations in quantum thermodynamics: Heat, work, and entropy production

We provide a characterization of energy in the form of exchanged heat and work between two interacting constituents of a closed, bipartite, correlated quantum system. By defining a binding energy we derive a consistent quantum formulation of the first law of thermodynamics, in which the role of correlations becomes evident, and this formulation reduces to the standard classical picture in relevant systems. We next discuss the emergence of the second law of thermodynamics under certain---but fairly general---conditions such as the Markovian assumption. We illustrate the role of correlations and interactions in thermodynamics through two examples.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Entanglement in Algebraic Quantum Mechanics: Majorana fermion systems

Many-body entanglement is studied within the algebraic approach to quantum physics in systems made of Majorana fermions. In this framework, the notion of separability stems from partitions of the algebra of observables and properties of the associated correlation functions, rather than on particle tensor products. This allows obtaining a complete characterization of non-separable Majorana fermion states. These results may find direct applications in quantum metrology: using Majorana systems, sub-shot noise accuracy in parameter estimations can be achieved without preliminary, resource consuming, state entanglement operations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Dissipative Dynamics of Quantum Fluctuations

One way to look for complex behaviours in many-body quantum systems is to let the number $N$ of degrees of freedom become large and focus upon collective observables. Mean-field quantities scaling as $1/N$ tend to commute, whence complexity at the quantum level can only be inherited from complexity at the classical level. Instead, fluctuations of microscopic observables scale as $1/\sqrt{N}$ and exhibit collective Bosonic features, typical of a mesoscopic regime half-way between the quantum one at the microscopic level and the classical one at the level of macroscopic averages. Here, we consider the mesoscopic behaviour emerging from an infinite quantum spin chain undergoing a microscopic dissipative, irreversible dynamics and from global states without long-range correlations and invariant under lattice translations and dynamics. We show that, from the fluctuations of one site spin observables whose linear span is mapped into itself by the dynamics, there emerge bosonic operators obeying a mesoscopic dissipative dynamics mapping Gaussian states into Gaussian states. Instead of just depleting quantum correlations because of decoherence effects, these maps can generate entanglement at the collective, mesoscopic level, a phenomenon with no classical analogue that embodies a peculiar complex behaviour at the interface between micro and macro regimes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Quantum interferences reconstruction with low homodyne detection efficiency

Standard quantum state reconstruction techniques indicate that a detection efficiency of $0.5$ is an absolute threshold below which quantum interferences cannot be measured. However, alternative statistical techniques suggest that this threshold can be overcome at the price of increasing the statistics used for the reconstruction. In the following we present numerical experiments proving that quantum interferences can be measured even with a detection efficiency smaller than $0.5$. At the same time we provide a guideline for handling the tomographic reconstruction of quantum states based on homodyne data collected by low efficiency detectors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Complete positivity and thermodynamics in a driven open quantum system

While it is well known that complete positivity guarantees the fulfilment of the second law of thermodynamics, its possible violations have never been proposed as a check of the complete positivity of a given open quantum dynamics. We hereby consider an open quantum micro-circuit, effectively describable as a two-level open quantum system, whose asymptotic current might be experimentally accessible. This latter could indeed be used to discriminate between its possible non-completely positive Redfield dynamics and a completely positive one obtained by standard weak-coupling limit techniques, at the same time verifying the fate of the second law of thermodynamics in such a context.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

Violations of the second law of thermodynamics by a non completely positive dynamics

We consider a recently proposed model of driven open quantum microcircuit [F. Pellegrini et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 060401 (2011)] amenable to experimental investigations. We show that such an open quantum system provides a concrete physical instance where to prove that modeling its time-evolution with a dynamics lacking complete positivity conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics.

quant-ph↗