Scaling-Up Quantum Heat Engines Efficiently via Shortcuts to Adiabaticity

Abstract

Abstract:The finite-time operation of a quantum heat engine that uses a single particle as a working medium generally increases the output power at the expense of inducing friction that lowers the cycle efficiency. We propose to scale up a quantum heat engine utilizing a many-particle working medium in combination with the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity to boost the nonadiabatic performance by eliminating quantum friction and reducing the cycle time. To this end, we first analyze the finite-time thermodynamics of a quantum Otto cycle implemented with a quantum fluid confined in a time-dependent harmonic trap. We show that nonadiabatic effects can be controlled and tailored to match the adiabatic performance using a variety of shortcuts to adiabaticity. As a result, the nonadiabatic dynamics of the scaled-up many-particle quantum heat engine exhibits no friction, and the cycle can be run at maximum efficiency with a tunable output power. We demonstrate our results with a working medium consisting of particles with inverse-square pairwise interactions that includes non-interacting and hard-core bosons as limiting cases.

Quantum supremacy of many-particle thermal machines

“…Equations (4), (5), and (6) are the first results of this article giving explicit formulae for the total output work and efficiency, and showing the fundamental bound on the efficiency of a nonadiabatic QHE with the wide family of systems (1) as a working medium [23,24]. We have recently discussed the optimization of a many-particle QHE using shortcut to adiabaticity [27].…”

Quantum Performance of Thermal Machines over Many Cycles

“…Identifying scenarios exhibiting quantum supremacy, with a performance surpassing that in classical thermodynamics, stands out as an open problem. To this end, the use of quantum coherence [13], nonequilibrium reservoirs [14,15], and many-particle effects [16,17] has been proposed.The performance of quantum thermal machines is usually assessed via the characterization of a single cycle, as in classical thermodynamics. This approach assumes that the average single-cycle efficiency and power carry over to an arbitrary number of cycles, i.e., work done through n cycles is expected to be equal to n times the work done per cycle.…”

“…Identifying scenarios exhibiting quantum supremacy, with a performance surpassing that in classical thermodynamics, stands out as an open problem. To this end, the use of quantum coherence [13], nonequilibrium reservoirs [14,15], and many-particle effects [16,17] has been proposed.…”

Magnetic Engine for the Single-Particle Landau Problem

“…However, we believe the readers will find attractive the study of the "full" quantum version of this cycle following the treatment of the works [28][29][30], where treated the magnetic substance under degenerate conditions using non-equilibrium techniques. Besides, it is promising to treat the quantum version of our formulation optimized following the work of Kosloff and Rezek [25], for the case of frictionless adiabats using the methods of shortcuts to adiabaticity [37][38][39]. Moreover, this problem can be extended taking in account the edge states of the systems for a more realistic approach.…”