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arXiv:1803.07918 · Physical Review A

Bosonic Szilard engine assisted by Feshbach resonances

J. Bengtsson, M. Nilsson Tengstrand, S. M. Reimann

Published Jun 29, 2018• 4 citations
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Abstract

It was recently found that the information-to-work conversion in a quantum Szilard engine can be increased by using a working medium of bosons with attractive interactions. In the original scheme, the work output depends on the insertion and removal position of an impenetrable barrier that acts like a piston, separating the chambers of the engine. Here, we show that the barrier removal process can be made fully reversible, resulting in a full information-to-work conversion if we also allow for the interaction strength to change during the cycle. Hence, it becomes possible to reach the maximum work output per cycle dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. These findings can be experimentally verified, for instance, with ultracold atoms as a working medium, where a change of interaction strength can be controlled by Feshbach resonances.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.062128

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It was recently found that the information-to-work conversion in a quantum Szilard engine can be increased by using a working medium of bosons with attractive interactions. In the original scheme, the work output depends on the insertion and removal position of an impenetrable barrier that acts like a piston, separating the chambers of the engine. Here, we show that the barrier removal process can be made fully reversible, resulting in a full information-to-work conversion if we also allow for the interaction strength to change during the cycle. Hence, it becomes possible to reach the maximum work output per cycle dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. These findings can be experimentally verified, for instance, with ultracold atoms as a working medium, where a change of interaction strength can be controlled by Feshbach resonances.
In a classic thought experiment, Szilard suggested a heat engine where a single particle, for example an atom or a molecule, is confined in a container coupled to a single heat bath. The container can be separated into two parts by a moveable wall acting as a piston. In a single cycle of the engine, work can be extracted from the information on which side of the piston the particle resides. The work output is consistent with Landauers principle that the erasure of one bit of information costs the entropy kB ln 2, exemplifying the fundamental relation between work, heat and information. Here we apply the concept of the Szilard engine to a fully interacting quantum many-body system. We find that a working medium of a number of bosons (larger or equal two) with attractive interactions is clearly superior to other previously discussed setups. In sharp contrast to the classical case, we find that the average work output increases with the particle number. The highest overshoot occurs for a small but finite temperature, showing an intricate interplay between thermal and quantum effects. We anticipate that our finding will shed new light on the role of information in controlling thermodynamic fluctuations in the deep quantum regime, which are strongly influenced by quantum correlations in interacting systems.
We show that a quantum Szilard engine containing many bosons with attractive interactions enhances the conversion between information and work. Using an ab initio approach to the full quantum-mechanical many-body problem, we find that the average work output increases significantly for a larger number of bosons. The highest overshoot occurs at a finite temperature, demonstrating how thermal and quantum effects conspire to enhance the conversion between information and work. The predicted effects occur over a broad range of interaction strengths and temperatures.
We investigate a thermodynamic cycle using a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) with nonlinear interactions as the working medium. Exploiting Feshbach resonances to change the interaction strength of the BEC allows us to produce work by expanding and compressing the gas. To ensure a large power output from this engine these strokes must be performed on a short timescale, however such non-adiabatic strokes can create irreversible work which degrades the engine's efficiency. To combat this, we design a shortcut to adiabaticity which can achieve an adiabatic-like evolution within a finite time, therefore significantly reducing the out-of-equilibrium excitations in the BEC. We investigate the effect of the shortcut to adiabaticity on the efficiency and power output of the engine and show that the tunable nonlinearity strength, modulated by Feshbach resonances, serves as a useful tool to enhance the system's performance.
In this thesis, different aspects of the quantum Szilard engine are studied using the configuration interaction method. The engine is modelled as a one-dimensional infinite well. The effects of a contact-interaction are examined and it is found that attractive contact-interactions can improve the work output at certain temperatures of an engine that has bosons as a working medium. The role of impurities in the engine is investigated and found to have a large impact on the low-temperature behaviour of the engine. Dynamics of a single-particle engine are considered in order to identify finite-speed effects in the engine's cycle.
We investigate a thermodynamic cycle using a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) with nonlinear interactions as the working medium. Exploiting Feshbach resonances to change the interaction strength of the BEC allows us to produce work by expanding and compressing the gas. To ensure a large power output from this engine these strokes must be performed on a short timescale, however such non-adiabatic strokes can create irreversible work which degrades the engine's efficiency. To combat this, we design a shortcut to adiabaticity which can achieve an adiabatic-like evolution within a finite time, therefore significantly reducing the out-of-equilibrium excitations in the BEC. We investigate the effect of the shortcut to adiabaticity on the efficiency and power output of the engine and show that the tunable nonlinearity strength, modulated by Feshbach resonances, serves as a useful tool to enhance the system's performance.
The Szilard engine (SZE) is the quintessence of Maxwell's demon, which can extract the work from a heat bath by utilizing information. We present the first complete quantum analysis of the SZE, and derive an analytic expression of the quantum-mechanical work performed by a quantum SZE containing an arbitrary number of molecules, where it is crucial to regard the process of insertion or removal of a wall as a legitimate thermodynamic process. We find that more (less) work can be extracted from the bosonic (fermionic) SZE due to the indistinguishability of identical particles.