Extraction of Work via a Thermalization Protocol

TL;DR

This paper proposes a thermalization-based protocol to extract work from a quantum resource system, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in the quantum Rabi model at zero temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, general protocol for work extraction via thermalization and analyzes its bounds and performance in the quantum Rabi model.

Findings

The protocol can extract work from a resource system using thermalization.

Theoretical bounds of work extraction are established.

Application to the quantum Rabi model shows satisfactory efficiency.

Abstract

This extended abstract contains an outline of the work reported at the conference IQIS2018. We show that it is possible to exploit a thermalization process to extract work from a resource system $R$ to a bipartite system $S$. To do this, we propose a simple protocol in a general setting in the presence of a single bath at temperature $T$ and then examine it when $S$ is described by the quantum Rabi model at $T=0$. We find the theoretical bounds of the protocol in the general case and we show that when applied to the Rabi model it gives rise to a satisfactory extraction of work and efficiency.