| （英） |
In recent years, fundamental connections between thermodynamics and information theory have been elucidated, and thermodynamic inference, which estimates physical quantities by applying thermodynamic relations, has attracted significant attention. Among these, the Jarzynski equality—a foundational relation—is particularly promising as a method for experimentally estimating free energy in quantum systems. However, the Jarzynski equality assumes unital quantum time evolution, making it difficult to apply in non-unital dynamics where interactions with external environments are present.
In this study, we propose a method to estimate free energy changes by correcting for environmental interactions, inspired by Zero Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), a technique developed in the field of quantum error mitigation. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulations based on the Lindblad equation and Kraus representations, using a two-qubit system initially in a Gibbs state. This work is expected to provide a means of estimating free energy changes in complex quantum systems where interactions with external environments cannot be neglected. |