Experimental Realization of a Quantum Refrigerator Driven by Indefinite Causal Orders.

Indefinite causal order (ICO) is playing a key role in recent quantum technologies. Here, we experimentally study quantum thermodynamics driven by ICO on nuclear spins using the nuclear magnetic resonance system. We realize the ICO of two thermalizing channels to exhibit how the mechanism works, and show that the working substance can be cooled or heated albeit it undergoes thermal contacts with reservoirs of the same temperature. Moreover, we construct a single cycle of the ICO refrigerator based on the Maxwell's demon mechanism, and evaluate its performance by measuring the work consumption and the heat energy extracted from the low-temperature reservoir. Unlike classical refrigerators in which the coefficient of performance (COP) is perversely higher the closer the temperature of the high-temperature and low-temperature reservoirs are to each other, the ICO refrigerator's COP is always bounded to small values due to the nonunit success probability in projecting the ancillary qubit to the preferable subspace. To enhance the COP, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a general framework based on the density matrix exponentiation (DME) approach, as an extension to the ICO refrigeration. The COP is observed to be enhanced by more than 3 times with the DME approach. Our Letter demonstrates a new way for nonclassical heat exchange, and paves the way towards construction of quantum refrigerators on a quantum system.

Experimental Observation of Equilibrium and Dynamical Quantum Phase Transitions via Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators.

The out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC), a fundamental concept for quantifying quantum information scrambling, has recently been suggested to be an order parameter to dynamically detect both equilibrium quantum phase transitions (EQPTs) and dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPTs). Here we report the first experimental observation of EQPTs and DQPTs in a quantum spin chain via quench dynamics of OTOC on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator. We observe that the quench dynamics of the OTOC can unambiguously detect the DQPTs and the equilibrium critical point, while conventional order parameters such as the longitudinal magnetization can not. Moreover, we investigate the two-body correlations throughout the quench dynamics, and find that OTOC can extract the equilibrium critical point with higher accuracy and is more robust to decoherence than that of two-body correlation. Our experiment paves a way for experimentally investigating DQPTs through OTOCs and for studying the EQPTs through the nonequilibrium quantum quench dynamics with quantum simulators.