Spin-chain model of a many-body quantum battery

TL;DR

This paper investigates a one-dimensional spin chain as a quantum battery, demonstrating that intrinsic two-body interactions can enhance charging power, especially with long-range interactions, without relying on correlations.

Contribution

It extends quantum battery models to many-body systems with realistic interactions, showing super-extensive power scaling due to intrinsic interactions.

Findings

Interactions improve charging power over non-interacting systems.

Long-range interactions lead to super-extensive power scaling.

The advantage arises from mean-field effects, not correlations.

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that energy can be deposited on a collection of quantum systems at a rate that scales super-extensively. Some of these schemes for `quantum batteries' rely on the use of global many-body interactions that take the batteries through a correlated short cut in state space. Here, we extend the notion of a quantum battery from a collection of a priori isolated systems to a many-body quantum system with intrinsic interactions. Specifically, we consider a one-dimensional spin chain with physically realistic two-body interactions. We find that the spin-spin interactions can yield an advantage in charging power over the non-interacting case, and we demonstrate that this advantage can grow super-extensively when the interactions are long ranged. However, we show that, unlike in previous work, this advantage is a mean-field interaction effect that does not involve correlations and that relies on the interactions being intrinsic to the battery.