# Entropy production in a photovoltaic cell

## TL;DR

This paper investigates entropy production in a quantum model of a photovoltaic cell, revealing how quantum coherence and environmental factors influence entropy flow and setting fundamental limits on heat dissipation.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel formalism to analyze nonlinear entropy production in quantum photovoltaic cells, highlighting the roles of quantum coherence and decoherence.

## Key findings

- Entropy production comprises semiclassical and quantum coherence-dependent flows.
- Reversal of information flow from cold to hot bath occurs under certain conditions.
- A lower bound on entropy production constrains heat dissipation statistics.

## Abstract

We evaluate entropy production in a photovoltaic cell that is modeled by four electronic levels resonantly coupled to thermally populated field modes at different temperatures. We use a formalism recently proposed, the so-called multiple parallel worlds, to consistently address the nonlinearity of entropy in terms of density matrix. Our result shows that entropy production is the difference between two flows: a semiclassical flow that linearly depends on occupational probabilities, and another flow that depends nonlinearly on quantum coherence and has no semiclassical analog. We show that entropy production in the cells depends on environmentally induced decoherence time and energy detuning. We characterize regimes where reversal flow of information takes place from a cold to hot bath. Interestingly, we identify a lower bound on entropy production, which sets limitations on the statistics of dissipated heat in the cells.