Description:

Professor Jukka Pekola, Aalto University, Finland

Title: Superconducting qubits as quantum refrigerators and heat switches

Abstract:

I will first discuss thermodynamics of small systems coupled to classical heat baths. Then I describe how one can measure heat currents in them. As concrete examples I introduce a four-stroke quantum Otto refrigerator and a recent experiment on a quantum heat switch, based on flux-tunable superconducting qubits. This device shows qualitatively different behavior depending on how strongly the qubit is coupled to the heat bath: a theoretical model to describe the observations in the two regimes of the experiment will be presented. In the last part of the talk I describe our progress in developing a nano-calorimeter aiming to detect stochastic quantum trajectories by fast measurement of temperature.

Host: William Halperin