Effects of noise-induced coherence on the performance of quantum absorption refrigerators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how noise-induced coherence affects the thermodynamic efficiency of quantum absorption refrigerators, revealing that performance enhancements can occur even in classical-like systems, implying a primarily interference-based mechanism.

Contribution

The study compares classical and quantum models of refrigerators, demonstrating that noise-induced coherence enhances performance mainly through static interference, not uniquely quantum effects.

Findings

Noise-induced coherence increases cooling power.

Classical and quantum models show similar performance enhancements.

Performance improvement is due to static interference phenomena.

Abstract

We study two models of quantum absorption refrigerators with the main focus on discerning the role of noise-induced coherence on their thermodynamic performance. Analogously to the previous studies on quantum heat engines, we find the increase in the cooling power due to the mechanism of noise-induced coherence. We formulate conditions imposed on the microscopic parameters of the models under which they can be equivalently described by classical stochastic processes and compare the performance of the two classes of fridges (effectively classical vs. truly quantum). We find that the enhanced performance is observed already for the effectively classical systems, with no significant qualitative change in the quantum cases, which suggests that the noise-induced-coherence enhancement mechanism is caused by static interference phenomena.