Comparative study of heat-driven and power-driven refrigerators with Coulomb-coupled quantum dots

TL;DR

This study compares heat-driven and power-driven Coulomb-coupled quantum dot refrigerators, revealing that heat-driven devices perform significantly worse due to limited charge fluctuations, with implications for nanoscale thermoelectric applications.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Coulomb-coupled quantum dot refrigerators, highlighting the superior performance of power-driven over heat-driven configurations.

Findings

Power-driven refrigerators outperform heat-driven ones.

Limited on-dot charge fluctuations hinder heat-driven device efficiency.

The study advances understanding of nanoscale thermoelectric refrigeration mechanisms.

Abstract

Multi-terminal multi-dot devices have been put forward as versatile and performant setups for thermoelectric energy harvesting at the nanoscale. With a technique that encompasses and overtakes several of the usual theoretical tools used in this context, we explore a three-terminal Coulomb-coupled-dot device for refrigeration purposes. The refrigerator is monitored by either a voltage or a thermal bias. This comparative study shows that heat driven refrigerator is much underperforming than the power driven one, due to scarce on-dot charge fluctuations.