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Updated: Mar 29, 2026

Generation and Coherent Control of Pulsed Quantum Frequency Combs
Published on: June 8, 2018
Fractional Control Gate Protocols for Quantum Engines
Elliot John Fox1, Taysa Mendes de Mendonça2, Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler3
1School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
None:
Nth-root gates allow for a paced application of two-qubit operations. We apply them in quantum thermodynamic protocols for operating a quantum heat engine. A set of circuits for two and three qubits is compared by considering maximum work production and related efficiency. Our results show that for all circuits considered and most regions of initial parameter space, quantum coherence of one of the qubits strongly increases the maximum work production and improves the system's performance as a quantum heat engine. In such circuits, coherence is initially imprinted into one of the qubits, improving the overall maximum extractable work. We focus here on the efficiency of such work extraction, assuming the initialisation of the qubits is a free resource. For the novel protocol that employs fractional control gates, work is generated with 84% up to 100% efficiency. Further, we uncover a strong linear correlation between work production and many-body correlations in the working medium generated by these gates.
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