Many-body quantum vacuum fluctuation engines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum engine that harnesses vacuum fluctuations in many-body systems, demonstrating how local measurements and feedback can extract work from entangled ground states, with performance influenced by quantum phase transitions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel many-body quantum engine utilizing vacuum fluctuations and local measurements, providing analytical results for work and efficiency in fermionic and bosonic models.

Findings

Work output scales with the number of systems involved.

Efficiency approaches unity with increasing system size in oscillator networks.

Quantum phase transitions enhance engine performance.

Abstract

We propose a many-body quantum engine powered by the energy difference between the entangled ground state of the interacting system and local separable states. Performing local energy measurements on an interacting many-body system can produce excited states from which work can be extracted via local feedback operations. These measurements reveal the quantum vacuum fluctuations of the global ground state in the local basis and provide the energy required to run the engine. The reset part of the engine cycle is particularly simple: The interacting many-body system is coupled to a cold bath and allowed to relax to its entangled ground state. We illustrate our proposal on two types of many-body systems: a chain of coupled qubits and coupled harmonic oscillator networks. These models faithfully represent fermionic and bosonic excitations, respectively. In both cases, analytical results for the work output and efficiency of the engine can be obtained. Generically, the work output scales as the number of quantum systems involved, while the efficiency limits to a constant. We prove the efficiency is controlled by the "local entanglement gap" -- the energy difference between the global ground state and the lowest energy eigenstate of the local Hamiltonian. In the qubit chain case, we highlight the impact of a quantum phase transition on the engine's performance as work and efficiency sharply increase at the critical point. In the case of a one-dimensional oscillator chain, we show the efficiency approaches unity as the number of coupled oscillators increases, even at finite work output.