Many-body quantum heat engines with shortcuts to adiabaticity

TL;DR

This paper develops local approximate counter-diabatic protocols for many-body quantum heat engines, significantly enhancing their efficiency and power at finite cycle times without needing prior eigenstate knowledge, making experimental implementation feasible.

Contribution

Introduction of local approximate counter-diabatic protocols for many-body quantum heat engines that improve performance without requiring full eigenstate knowledge.

Findings

Enhanced efficiency and power at finite cycle times.

Protocols are experimentally feasible due to lack of eigenstate requirement.

Significant improvement over traditional adiabatic cycles.

Abstract

Quantum heat engines are modeled by thermodynamic cycles with quantum-mechanical working media. Since high engine efficiencies require adiabaticity, a major challenge is to yield a nonvanishing power output at finite cycle times. Shortcuts to adiabaticity using counter-diabatic (CD) driving may serve as a means to speed up such, otherwise infinitely long, cycles. We introduce local approximate CD protocols for many-body spin quantum heat engines and show that this method improves the efficiency and power for finite cycle times considerably. The protocol does not require a priori knowledge of the system eigenstates and is thus realistic in experiments.