Collectively enhanced thermalization via multiqubit collisions

Increasing Extractable Work in Small Qubit Landscapes

An interesting class of physical systems, including those associated with life, demonstrates the ability to hold thermalization at bay and perpetuate states of high free-energy compared to a local environment. In this work we study quantum systems with no external sources or sinks for energy, heat, work, or entropy that allow for high free-energy subsystems to form and persist. We initialize systems of qubits in mixed, uncorrelated states and evolve them subject to a conservation law. We find that four qubits make up the minimal system for which these restricted dynamics and initial conditions allow an increase in extractable work for a subsystem. On landscapes of eight co-evolving qubits, interacting in randomly selected subsystems at each step, we demonstrate that restricted connectivity and an inhomogeneous distribution of initial temperatures both lead to landscapes with longer intervals of increasing extractable work for individual qubits. We demonstrate the role of correlations that develop on the landscape in enabling a positive change in extractable work.

Heat transport and rectification via quantum statistical and coherence asymmetries

Recent experiments at the nanoscales confirm that thermal rectifiers, the thermal equivalent of electrical diodes, can operate in the quantum regime. We present a thorough investigation of the effect of different particle exchange statistics, coherence, and collective interactions on the quantum heat transport of rectifiers with two-terminal junctions. Using a collision model approach to describe the open system dynamics, we obtain a general expression of the nonlinear heat flow that fundamentally deviates from the Landauer formula whenever quantum statistical or coherence asymmetries are present in the bath particles. Building on this, we show that heat rectification is possible even with symmetric medium-bath couplings if the two baths differ in quantum statistics or coherence. Furthermore, the associated thermal conductance vanishes exponentially at low temperatures as in the Coulomb-blockade effect. However, at high temperatures it acquires a power-law behavior depending on the quantum statistics. Our results can be significant for heat management in hybrid open quantum systems or solid-state thermal circuits.

Work extraction from single-mode thermal noise by measurements: How important is information?

Our goal in this article is to elucidate the rapport of work and information in the context of a minimal quantum-mechanical setup: a converter of heat input to work output, the input consisting of a single oscillator mode prepared in a hot thermal state along with a few much colder oscillator modes. The core issues we consider, taking account of the quantum nature of the setup, are as follows: (i) How and to what extent can information act as a work resource or, conversely, be redundant for work extraction? (ii) What is the optimal way of extracting work via information acquired by measurements? (iii) What is the bearing of information on the efficiency-power tradeoff achievable in such setups? We compare the efficiency of work extraction and the limitations of power in our minimal setup by different, generic, measurement strategies of the hot and cold modes. For each strategy, the rapport of work and information extraction is found and the cost of information erasure is allowed for. The possibilities of work extraction without information acquisition, via nonselective measurements, are also analyzed. Overall, we present, by generalizing a method based on optimized homodyning that we have recently proposed, the following insight: extraction of work by observation and feedforward that only measures a small fraction of the input is clearly advantageous to the conceivable alternatives. Our results may become the basis of a practical strategy of converting thermal noise to useful work in optical setups, such as coherent amplifiers of thermal light, as well as in their optomechanical and photovoltaic counterparts.

Quantum Collision Models: A Beginner Guide

In recent years, quantum collision models, sometimes dubbed repeated interaction models, have gained much attention due to their simplicity and their capacity to convey ideas without resorting to technical complications typical of many approaches and techniques used in the field of open quantum systems. In this tutorial, we show how to use these models, highlighting their strengths and some technical subtleties often overlooked in the literature. We do this by deriving the Markovian master equation and comparing the standard collisional derivation with the standard microscopic one. We then use the collision model to derive the master equation of a two-level system interacting with either a bosonic or fermionic bath to give the reader a flavour of the real use of the model.

Steady-State Thermodynamics of a Cascaded Collision Model

We study the steady-state thermodynamics of a cascaded collision model where two subsystems S1 and S2 collide successively with an environment R in the cascaded fashion. We first formulate general expressions of thermodynamics quantities and identify the nonlocal forms of work and heat that result from cascaded interactions of the system with the common environment. Focusing on a concrete system of two qubits, we then show that, to be able to unidirectionally influence the thermodynamics of S2, the former interaction of S1-R should not be energy conserving. We finally demonstrate that the steady-state coherence generated in the cascaded model is a kind of useful resource in extracting work, quantified by ergotropy, from the system. Our results provide a comprehensive understanding on the thermodynamics of the cascaded model and a possible way to achieve the unidirectional control on the thermodynamics process in the steady-state regime.

Qubit thermodynamics far from equilibrium: Two perspectives about the nature of heat and work in the quantum regime

Considering an entropy-based division of energy transferred into heat and work, we develop an alternative theoretical framework for the thermodynamic analysis of two-level systems. When comparing these results with those obtained using the standard definitions of these quantities, we observe the appearance of a different term of work, which represents the energy cost of rotating the Bloch vector in the presence of the external field that defines the local Hamiltonian. Additionally, we obtain explicit expressions for the temperature, the heat capacity, and the internal entropy production of the system in both paradigms. In order to illustrate our findings we study, from both perspectives, matter-radiation interaction processes for two different systems.

Effect of Inter-System Coupling on Heat Transport in a Microscopic Collision Model

In this paper we consider a bipartite system composed of two subsystems each coupled to its own thermal environment. Based on a collision model, we mainly study whether the approximation (i.e., the inter-system coupling is ignored when modeling the system–environment interaction) is valid or not. We also address the problem of heat transport unitedly for both excitation-conserving system–environment interactions and non-excitation-conserving system–environment interactions. For the former interaction, as the inter-system interaction strength increases, at first this approximation gets worse as expected, but then counter-intuitively gets better even for a stronger inter-system coupling. For the latter interaction with asymmetry, this approximation gets progressively worse. In this case we realize a perfect thermal rectification, and we cannot find an apparent rectification effect for the former interaction. Finally and more importantly, our results show that whether this approximation is valid or not is closely related to the quantum correlations between the subsystems, i.e., the weaker the quantum correlations, the more justified the approximation and vice versa.

Collision Models Can Efficiently Simulate Any Multipartite Markovian Quantum Dynamics

We introduce the multipartite collision model, defined in terms of elementary interactions between subsystems and ancillas, and show that it can simulate the Markovian dynamics of any multipartite open quantum system. We develop a method to estimate an analytical error bound for any repeated interactions model, and we use it to prove that the error of our scheme displays an optimal scaling. Finally, we provide a simple decomposition of the multipartite collision model into elementary quantum gates, and show that it is efficiently simulable on a quantum computer according to the dissipative quantum Church-Turing theorem, i.e., it requires a polynomial number of resources.

Ergotropy from coherences in an open quantum system

We show that it is possible to have nonzero ergotropy in the steady states of an open quantum system consisting of qubits that are collectively coupled to a thermal bath at a finite temperature. The dynamics of our model leads the qubits into a steady state that has coherences in the energy eigenbasis when the system consists of more than a single qubit. We observe that even though the system does not have inverted populations, it is possible to extract work from the coherences and we analytically show that in the high-temperature limit, ergotropy per unit energy is equal to the l_{1} norm of coherence for the two-qubit case. Further, we analyze the scaling of coherence and ergotropy as a function of the number of qubits in the system for different initial states. Our results demonstrate that one can design a quantum battery that is charged by a dissipative thermal bath in the weak-coupling regime.

Quantum Statistical Enhancement of the Collective Performance of Multiple Bosonic Engines

We consider an ensemble of indistinguishable quantum machines and show that quantum statistical effects can give rise to a genuine quantum enhancement of the collective thermodynamic performance. When multiple indistinguishable bosonic work resources are coupled to an external system, the internal energy change of the external system exhibits an enhancement arising from permutation symmetry in the ensemble, which is absent when the latter consists of distinguishable work resources.