Entanglement boost for extractable work from ensembles of quantum batteries

Motivated by the recent interest in thermodynamics of micro- and mesoscopic quantum systems we study the maximal amount of work that can be reversibly extracted from a quantum system used to temporarily store energy. Guided by the notion of passivity of a quantum state we show that entangling unitary controls extract in general more work than independent ones. In the limit of a large number of copies one can reach the thermodynamical bound given by the variational principle for the free energy.

Figure 1

Energy per copy of passive state ${\sigma }_{{\otimes }^n\rho }$ associated with ${\otimes }^n\rho$.