Minimizing Dissipation via Interacting Environments: Quadratic Convergence to Landauer Bound

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that by using interacting finite-size reservoirs near phase transitions, one can achieve quadratic decay of entropy production, approaching the Landauer bound more efficiently than with non-interacting reservoirs.

Contribution

The authors establish fundamental limits on thermodynamic irreversibility in quantum cooling and introduce a protocol leveraging interactions to optimize entropy reduction.

Findings

Entropy production decays at most linearly with reservoir size for non-interacting systems.

A new cooling protocol achieves a quadratic decay of entropy production with reservoir size.

Interacting reservoirs near phase transitions enable more efficient cooling close to the Landauer bound.

Abstract

We explore the fundamental limits on thermodynamic irreversibility when cooling a quantum system in the presence of a finite-size reservoir. First, we prove that for any non-interacting $n$-particle reservoir, the entropy production $\Sigma$ decays at most linearly with $n$. Instead, we derive a cooling protocol in which $\Sigma \propto 1/n^2$, which is in fact the best possible scaling. This becomes possible due to the presence of interactions in the finite-size reservoir, which must be prepared at the verge of a phase transition. Our results open the possibility of cooling with a higher energetic efficiency via interacting reservoirs.