Common environmental effects on quantum thermal transistor

TL;DR

This paper investigates how common environmental effects influence the performance of a quantum thermal transistor made of three strongly coupled qubits, revealing that such effects can preserve and even enhance its heat modulation capabilities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that carefully designed common environments can maintain and modestly improve the amplification rate of quantum thermal transistors, introducing the role of dark states in control.

Findings

Functions of the thermal transistor can be maintained with common environments.

Amplification rate can be modestly enhanced through environment design.

Dark states enable additional control channels without disturbing amplification.

Abstract

Quantum thermal transistor is a microscopic thermodynamical device that can modulate and amplify heat current through two terminals by the weak heat current at the third terminal. Here we study the common environmental effects on a quantum thermal transistor made up of three strong-coupling qubits. It is shown that the functions of the thermal transistor can be maintained and the amplification rate can be modestly enhanced by the skillfully designed common environments. In particular,the presence of a dark state in the case of the completely correlated transitions can provide an additional external channel to control the heat currents without any disturbance of the amplification rate. These results show that common environment effect can offer new insight on improving the performance of quantum thermal devices.