Role of topology in determining the precision of a finite thermometer

Phys Rev E. 2021 Jul;104(1-1):014136. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.104.014136.

Abstract

Temperature fluctuations of a finite system follow the Landau bound δT^{2}=T^{2}/C(T) where C(T) is the heat capacity of the system. In turn, the same bound sets a limit to the precision of temperature estimation when the system itself is used as a thermometer. In this paper, we employ graph theory and the concept of Fisher information to assess the role of topology on the thermometric performance of a given system. We find that low connectivity is a resource to build precise thermometers working at low temperatures, whereas highly connected systems are suitable for higher temperatures. Upon modeling the thermometer as a set of vertices for the quantum walk of an excitation, we compare the precision achievable by position measurement to the optimal one, which itself corresponds to energy measurement.