Experimentally probing Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime

Abstract

Landauer's principle bridges information theory and thermodynamics by linking the entropy change of a system during a process to the average energy dissipated to its environment. Although typically discussed in the context of erasing a single bit of information, Landauer's principle can be generalised to characterise irreversibility in out-of-equilibrium processes, such as those involving complex quantum many-body systems. Specifically, the relationship between the entropy change of the system and the energy dissipated to its environment can be decomposed into changes in quantum mutual information and a difference in relative entropies of the environment. Here we experimentally probe Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime using a quantum field simulator of ultracold Bose gases. Employing a dynamical tomographic reconstruction scheme, we track the temporal evolution of the quantum field following a global mass quench from a massive to massless Klein-Gordon model and analyse the thermodynamic and information-theoretic contributions to a generalised entropy production for various system-environment partitions of the composite system. Our results verify the quantum field theoretical calculations, interpreted using a semi-classical quasiparticle picture. Our work demonstrates the ability of ultracold atom-based quantum field simulators to experimentally investigate quantum thermodynamics.