Quantum Many-Body Thermodynamic Engines

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General audience abstract:Thermodynamics, originally developed in the 19th century as a tool for understanding the performance of steam engines, has developed into a central theoretical model which lies at the foundation of our modern understanding of the physical world. While it is increasingly understood that quantum phenomena can modify and in some cases enhance the performance of thermodynamic engines beyond classical limits, few experimental realizations of quantum heat engines have been demonstrated. This project will realize heat engines which use deeply quantum-mechanical trapped gases as a working fluid, in order to explore technological and scientific opportunities at the interface between 19th-century thermodynamics and 21st-century quantum control. The experiments may enable not only applications in the energy efficiency of emerging quantum technologies, but also new insights into the foundations of technologically-relevant principles of thermodynamics. The research will be performed by postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students, who will benefit from mentorship and training in modern techniques of experimental quantum mechanics. A graduate-undergraduate team will be supported in each summer of the grant period to develop their skills in mentoring and laboratory research. The PI will expand his efforts to support the professional development of young researchers via workshops and lectures in a targeted undergraduate course.Technical audience abstract:While quantum coherence has been shown to enable beyond-classical performance in single-particle quantum heat engines, the role of characteristics such as entanglement in many-body quantum thermodynamic engines is incompletely understood and remains a topic of active investigation. This project explores quantum many-body thermodynamic engines using tunable interacting degenerate bosonic gases as the working fluid. The project has three specific aims: the creation of a many-body Feshbach engine using a Bose condensate with tunable interactions, the experimental optimization of a quantum thermodynamic engine using shortcuts to adiabaticity, and the realization of a heat engine with a many-body-localized quantum gas as the working fluid. Success would pave the way for the application of modern quantum control techniques to some of the most fundamental thermodynamic processes of energy usage and conversion. In the long run, a better understanding of quantum thermodynamics could have an impact on many aspects of science and technology, including potentially the effort to develop efficient quantum information processing architectures. Furthermore, the results of this work will strengthen the already-vibrant interplay and exchange of ideas between the fields of quantum thermodynamics and atomic physics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.