We study the connection between the charging power of quantum batteries and the fluctuations of the extractable work. We prove that in order to have a nonzero rate of change of the extractable work, the state ${\rho }_{\mathcal{W}}$ of the battery cannot be an eigenstate of a “free energy operator,” defined by $\mathcal{F}\equiv H_{\mathcal{W}}+{\beta }^{-1}\log ({\rho }_{\mathcal{W}})$, where $H_{\mathcal{W}}$ is the Hamiltonian of the battery and $\beta$ is the inverse temperature of a reference thermal bath with respect to which the extractable work is calculated. We do so by proving that fluctuations in the free energy operator upper bound the charging power of a quantum battery. Our findings also suggest that quantum coherence in the battery enhances the charging process, which we illustrate on a toy model of a heat engine.

The presence of noise or the interaction with an environment can radically change the dynamics of observables of an otherwise isolated quantum system. We derive a bound on the speed with which observables of open quantum systems evolve. This speed limit is divided into Mandelstam and Tamm’s original time-energy uncertainty relation and a time-information uncertainty relation recently derived for classical systems, and both are generalized to open quantum systems. By isolating the coherent and incoherent contributions to the system dynamics, we derive both lower and upper bounds on the speed of evolution. We prove that the latter provide tighter limits on the speed of observables than previously known quantum speed limits and that a preferred basis of speed operators serves to completely characterize the observables that saturate the speed limits. We use this construction to bound the effect of incoherent dynamics on the evolution of an observable and to find the Hamiltonian that gives the maximum coherent speedup to the evolution of an observable.

We give rigorous analytical results on the temporal behavior of two-point correlation functions—also known as dynamical response functions or Green’s functions—in closed many-body quantum systems. We show that in a large class of translation-invariant models the correlation functions factorize at late times $⟨A(t)B{⟩}_{\beta }\to ⟨A{⟩}_{\beta }⟨B{⟩}_{\beta }$, thus proving that dissipation emerges out of the unitary dynamics of the system. We also show that for systems with a generic spectrum the fluctuations around this late-time value are bounded by the purity of the thermal ensemble, which generally decays exponentially with system size. For autocorrelation functions we provide an upper bound on the timescale at which they reach the factorized late time value. Remarkably, this bound is only a function of local expectation values and does not increase with system size. We give numerical examples that show that this bound is a good estimate in nonintegrable models, and argue that the timescale that appears can be understood in terms of an emergent fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Our study extends to further classes of two point functions such as the symmetrized ones and the Kubo function that appears in linear response theory, for which we give analogous results.

We study the role of coherence in closed and open quantum batteries. We obtain upper bounds to the work performed or energy exchanged by both closed and open quantum batteries in terms of coherence. Specifically, we show that the energy storage can be bounded by the Hilbert-Schmidt coherence of the density matrix in the spectral basis of the unitary operator that encodes the evolution of the battery. We also show that an analogous bound can be obtained in terms of the battery's Hamiltonian coherence in the basis of the unitary operator by evaluating their commutator. We apply these bounds to a 4-state quantum system and the anisotropic XY Ising model in the closed system case, and the Spin-Boson model in the open case.

We upper bound and lower bound the optimal precision with which one can estimate an unknown Hamiltonian parameter via measurements of Gibbs thermal states with a known temperature. The bounds depend on the uncertainty in the Hamiltonian term that contains the parameter and on the term’s degree of noncommutativity with the full Hamiltonian: higher uncertainty and commuting operators lead to better precision. We apply the bounds to show that there exist entangled thermal states such that the parameter can be estimated with an error that decreases faster than $1/\sqrt{n}$, beating the standard quantum limit. This result governs Hamiltonians where an unknown scalar parameter (e.g., a component of a magnetic field) is coupled locally and identically to $n$ qubit sensors. In the high-temperature regime, our bounds allow for pinpointing the optimal estimation error, up to a constant prefactor. Our bounds generalize to joint estimations of multiple parameters. In this setting, we recover the high-temperature sample scaling derived previously via techniques based on quantum state discrimination and coding theory. In an application, we show that noncommuting conserved quantities hinder the estimation of chemical potentials.

The adiabatic theorem provides sufficient conditions for the time needed to prepare a target ground state. While it is possible to prepare a target state much faster with more general quantum annealing protocols, rigorous results beyond the adiabatic regime are rare. Here, we provide such a result, deriving lower bounds on the time needed to successfully perform quantum annealing. The bounds are asymptotically saturated by three toy models where fast annealing schedules are known: the Roland and Cerf unstructured search model, the Hamming spike problem, and the ferromagnetic $p$-spin model. Our bounds demonstrate that these schedules have optimal scaling. Our results also show that rapid annealing requires coherent superpositions of energy eigenstates, singling out quantum coherence as a computational resource.