Fluctuation in energy extraction from quantum batteries: How open should the system be to control it?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the openness of a quantum system influences fluctuations in energy extraction, revealing that open systems can better control fluctuations and that larger batteries reduce these fluctuations across various process classes.

Contribution

It establishes the relationship between system openness, process class, and fluctuation control, showing that open systems and larger batteries minimize energy extraction fluctuations.

Findings

Open systems better control energy fluctuations.

Fluctuations scale inversely with battery dimension.

Unitary and open processes achieve similar low fluctuations.

Abstract

We ask whether there exists a relation between controllability of the fluctuations in extractable energy of a quantum battery and (a) how open an arbitrary but fixed battery system is and (b) how large the battery is. We examine three classes of quantum processes for the energy extraction: unitary operations, completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) maps, and arbitrary quantum maps, including physically realizable non-CPTP maps. We show that all three process classes yield the same average extractable energy from a fixed quantum battery. Moreover, open systems are better at controlling fluctuations in fixed quantum batteries: while random unitary operations result in nonzero fluctuation in the extractable energy, the remaining two classes lead to vanishing fluctuations in extractable energy. Furthermore, when the auxiliary system used to implement the non-unitary physically realizable maps is restricted up to a dimension $n$, fluctuation in extractable energy scales as $1/n$ for CPTP maps, outperforming the $\ln{n}/n$ scaling observed for general quantum maps. Even within open dynamics, therefore, energy extraction via random CPTP maps exhibits greater resilience to fluctuation compared to processes based on arbitrary quantum maps. We subsequently obtain that fluctuations in extractable energy scale as the inverse of the battery's dimension for all three process classes. Unitary maps, therefore, perform - in the sense of as low fluctuation as possible - equally well as more resource-intensive open maps, provided we have access to large quantum batteries. The results underscore a fundamental trade-off between performance of a battery and the resource cost of implementing the extraction processes.