Dynamical approach to ancilla-assisted quantum thermometry

A scheme for improving the sensitivity of quantum thermometry is proposed where the sensing quantum system used to recover the temperature of an external bath is dynamically coupled with an external ancilla (a meter) via a Hamiltonian term ĤI. At variance with previous approaches, our scheme relies neither on the presence of initial entanglement between the sensor and the meter, nor on the possibility of performing joint measurements on the two systems. The advantages we report arise from the fact that the presence of ĤI interferes with the bath-sensor interaction, transforming the sensor into an effective transducer which extracts the intrinsically incoherent information on the bath temperature, and maps it into coherences in the meter where it can finally be recovered by local measurements.