Role of topology in determining the precision of a finite thermometer

Abstract

Temperature fluctuations of a finite system follows 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 modelling 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.