Artificial Quantum Thermal Bath

Temperature determines the relative probability of observing a physical system in an energy state when that system is energetically in equilibrium with its environment. In this manuscript, we present a theory for engineering the temperature of a quantum system different from its ambient temperature, that is basically an analog version of the quantum metropolis algorithm. We define criteria for an engineered quantum bath that, when couples to a quantum system with Hamiltonian H, drives the system to the equilibrium state e−H/TTr(e−H/T) with a tunable parameter T. For a system of superconducting qubits, we propose a circuit-QED approximate realization of such an engineered thermal bath consisting of driven lossy resonators. We consider an artificial thermal bath as a simulator for many-body physics or a controllable temperature knob for a hybrid quantum-thermal annealer.