Nonlinearity-assisted advantage for open Dicke-quantum batteries

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonlinearities in a Dicke quantum battery, including nonlinear coupling and anharmonic cavities, enhance energy storage and extraction efficiency, showing advantages over linear systems through steady-state ergotropy improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of nonlinear effects in open-system Dicke quantum batteries, demonstrating their benefits for energy storage and extraction compared to linear models.

Findings

Nonlinear coupling enhances steady-state ergotropy.

Nonlinear interactions reduce the time to reach maximum ergotropy.

Anharmonic cavities outperform harmonic ones in maximum ergotropy.

Abstract

We analyze the performance of a quantum battery in terms of energy storage and energy extraction, assisted by nonlinearities in a Dicke quantum battery utilizing an open-system approach. In particular, we consider two types of nonlinearities in the system, viz. nonlinearity in the coupling between battery and the cavity, and the cavity itself comprising an anharmonic oscillator. In both these scenarios, the cavity is connected to an environment, and is driven by an external laser source. We derive the Markovian master equation for the dynamics of the combined cavity-battery system in presence of the environment. When the cavity is non-linearly coupled to a battery, we find an enhancement in the steady state ergotropy over the linearly-coupled case. We further see that the times at which steady state ergotopy is attained get decreased in the presence of nonlinear coupling. We additionally find a complementarity between the nonlinear interaction strength and the coherent-drive strength in the steady-state ergotropy values, i.e. the same ergotropy as that obtained using weak nonlinearity and strong coherent drive can be obtained utilizing an opposite order of their values. We also identify the nonlinear interaction where the cavity can be considered as a ``charger" and show an advantage of using the nonlinear coupling over linear ones. In case when the cavity is modeled as a multi-level transmon with an inherent anharmonicity, we find an advantage in maximum ergotropy values over the harmonic instance. Unlike the non-linearly coupled batteries, the ones mediated by an anharmonic cavity prove to be useful in the transient regime. We also determine values of the coherent drive for which the anharmonic battery is beneficial over the harmonic one at all timescales. Further, we observe a distinct region of the anharmonic strength and coherent drive where ergotropy values reach their maxima.