Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2014) 129: 258
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2014-14258-0

Regular Article

Prospects and limitations of algorithmic cooling

¹ Département IRO, Université de Montréal, H3C 3J7, Montréal (QC), Canada
² The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada
³ Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH, Zürich, Switzerland
⁴ Department of Computer Science, Technion, 32000, Haifa, Israel

^* e-mail: yossiv@technion.ac.il

Received: 3 May 2014
Revised: 12 October 2014
Accepted: 30 October 2014
Published online: 28 November 2014

Abstract

Heat-bath algorithmic cooling (AC) of spins is a theoretically powerful effective-cooling approach that (ideally) cools spins with low polarization exponentially better than cooling by reversible entropy manipulations alone. Here, we investigate the limitations and prospects of AC. For non-ideal and semioptimal AC, we study the impact of finite relaxation times of reset and computation spins on the achievable effective cooling. We derive, via simulations, the attainable cooling levels for given ratios of relaxation times using two semioptimal practicable algorithms. We expect this analysis to be valuable for the planning of future experiments. For ideal and optimal AC, we make use of lower bounds on the number of required reset steps, based on entropy considerations, to present important consequences of using AC as a tool for improving signal-to-noise ratio in liquid-state magnetic resonance spectroscopy. In addition to the analysis of limitations, we also discuss prospective bio-medical applications; in particular, we discuss the potential use of AC for non-invasive clinical diagnosis and drug monitoring, where it may have significantly lower specific absorption rate (SAR) with respect to currently used methods.