Fluctuating quantum heat

Abstract

The increase in average energy of a quantum system undergoing projective energy measurements is referred to as "quantum heat", which is always zero. In the framework of quantum stochastic thermodynamics, this is constructed as the average over the fluctuating quantum heat (FQH), defined as the increase in expected value of the Hamiltonian along two-point eigenstate trajectories. However, such a definition has two drawbacks: (i) if the initial state does not commute with the Hamiltonian and has degeneracies, the higher moments of the FQH will not be uniquely defined, and therefore it is arguable whether such a quantity is physically meaningful; (ii) the definition is operationally demanding as it requires full knowledge of the initial state. In the present manuscript we show that the FQH is an instance of conditional increase in energy given sequential measurements, the first of which is with respect to the eigen-decomposition of the initial state. By coarse-graining this initial measurement, first by only distinguishing between degenerate subspaces of the state, and finally by not distinguishing between any subspace at all, we provide two alternative definitions for the FQH, which we call the partially coarse-grained FQH and fully coarse-grained FQH, respectively. The partially coarse-grained FQH resolves issue (i), whereas the fully coarse-grained FQH resolves both (i) and (ii).