Work estimation and work fluctuations in the presence of non-ideal measurements

Understand

From the perspective of quantum thermodynamics, realisable measurements cost work and result in measurement devices that are not perfectly correlated with the measured systems.

• We investigate the consequences for the estimation of work in non-equilibrium processes and for the fundamental structure of the work fluctuations when one assumes that the measurements are non-ideal.
• We show that obtaining work estimates and their statistical moments at finite work cost implies an imperfection of the estimates themselves: more accurate estimates incur higher costs.
• Our results provide a qualitative relation between the cost of obtaining information about work and the trustworthiness of this information.