Performance of a quantum heat engine at strong reservoir coupling

David Newman, Florian Mintert, and Ahsan Nazir
Phys. Rev. E 95, 032139 – Published 27 March 2017

Abstract

We study a quantum heat engine at strong coupling between the system and the thermal reservoirs. Exploiting a collective coordinate mapping, we incorporate system-reservoir correlations into a consistent thermodynamic analysis, thus circumventing the usual restriction to weak coupling and vanishing correlations. We apply our formalism to the example of a quantum Otto cycle, demonstrating that the performance of the engine is diminished in the strong coupling regime with respect to its weakly coupled counterpart, producing a reduced net work output and operating at a lower energy conversion efficiency. We identify costs imposed by sudden decoupling of the system and reservoirs around the cycle as being primarily responsible for the diminished performance, and we define an alternative operational procedure which can partially recover the work output and efficiency. More generally, the collective coordinate mapping holds considerable promise for wider studies of thermodynamic systems beyond weak reservoir coupling.

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  • Received 7 October 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.032139

©2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

General PhysicsStatistical Physics & ThermodynamicsAtomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

David Newman1,*, Florian Mintert1, and Ahsan Nazir2

  • 1Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
  • 2Photon Science Institute and School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

  • *d.newman14@imperial.ac.uk

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Vol. 95, Iss. 3 — March 2017

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