We study a quantum Stirling cycle which extracts work using quantized energy levels of a potential well. The work and the efficiency of the engine depend on the length of the potential well, and the Carnot efficiency is approached in a low temperature limiting case. We show that the lack of information about the position of the particle inside the potential well can be converted into useful work without resorting to any measurement. In the low temperature limit, we calculate the amount of work extractable from distinguishable particles, fermions, and bosons.

We explore the possibility of using "weak" measurements to carry out quantum state tomography via numerical simulations. Given a fixed number of copies of identically prepared states of a qubit, we perform state tomography using weak as well as projective measurements. Due to the collapse of the state after measurement, we cannot reuse the state after a projective measurement. If the coupling strength between the quantum system and the measurement device is made weaker, the disturbance caused to the state can be lowered. This then allows us to reuse the same member of the ensemble for further measurements and thus extract more information from the system. However, this happens at the cost of getting imprecise information from the first measurement. We implement this scheme for a single qubit and show that under certain circumstances, it can outperform the projective measurement-based tomography scheme. This opens up the possibility of new ways of extracting information from quantum ensembles. We study the efficacy of this scheme for different coupling strengths, and different ensemble sizes.

We experimentally construct a novel three-qubit entangled W-superposition (WW) state on an NMR quantum information processor. We give a measurement-based filtration protocol for the invertible local operation (ILO) that converts the WW state to the GHZ state, using a register of three ancilla qubits. Further we implement an experimental protocol to reconstruct full information about the three-party WW state using only two-party reduced density matrices. An intriguing fact unearthed recently is that the WW state which is equivalent to the GHZ state under ILO, is in fact reconstructible from its two-party reduced density matrices, unlike the GHZ state. We hence demonstrate that although the WW state is interconvertible with the GHZ state, it stores entanglement very differently.

A common-sense perception of a physical system is that it is inseparable from its physical properties. The notion of Quantum Chesire Cat challenges this, as far as quantum systems are concerned. It shows that a quantum system can be decoupled from its physical property under suitable pre and postselections. However, in the Quantum Cheisre Cat setup, the decoupling is not permanent. The photon, for example, and its polarization is separated and then recombined. In this paper, we present a thought experiment where we decouple two photons from their respective polarizations and then interchange them during recombination. Thus, our proposal shows that that the belongingness of a property for a physical system is very volatile in the world of quantum mechanics.