Cooperative efficiency boost for quantum heat engines

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-adiabatic cooperative operations in many-body quantum heat engines can significantly enhance power and efficiency, surpassing traditional adiabatic methods by leveraging collective non-passive states.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to boost quantum heat engine performance through cooperative non-adiabatic processes and analytically establishes efficiency bounds based on many-body effects.

Findings

Efficiency increases with the number of copies in the Otto cycle.

Efficiency reaches a many-body bound.

Non-adiabaticity enables cooperative effects in quantum engines.

Abstract

The power and efficiency of many-body heat engines can be boosted by performing cooperative non-adiabatic operations in contrast to the commonly used adiabatic implementations. Here, the key property relies on the fact that non-adiabaticity is required in order to allow for cooperative effects, that can use the thermodynamic resources only present in the collective non-passive state of a many-body system. In particular, we consider the efficiency of an Otto cycle, which increases with the number of copies used and reaches a many-body bound, which we discuss analytically.