Optimal energy conversion through anti-adiabatic driving breaking time-reversal symmetry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that an anti-adiabatic driven heat engine using a harmonic oscillator can achieve near-perfect efficiency with finite power by breaking time-reversal symmetry, surpassing traditional thermodynamic limits.

Contribution

It provides an exact analysis of a periodically driven underdamped harmonic oscillator heat engine in the anti-adiabatic limit, revealing conditions for optimal energy conversion.

Findings

Achieves near-ideal efficiency with finite power in the anti-adiabatic limit.

Breaking time-reversal symmetry enables simultaneous high efficiency and power.

Non-Markovian dynamics can further enhance power-efficiency trade-offs.

Abstract

Starting with Carnot engine, the ideal efficiency of a heat engine has been associated with quasi-static transformations and vanishingly small output power. Here, we exactly calculate the thermodynamic properties of a isothermal heat engine, in which the working medium is a periodically driven underdamped harmonic oscillator, focusing instead on the opposite, anti-adiabatic limit, where the period of a cycle is the fastest time scale in the problem. We show that in that limit it is possible to approach the ideal energy conversion efficiency $\eta=1$, with finite output power and vanishingly small relative power fluctuations. The simultaneous realization of all the three desiderata of a heat engine is possible thanks to the breaking of time-reversal symmetry. We also show that non-Markovian dynamics can further improve the power-efficiency trade-off.