Work extraction protocol is always a significant issue in the context of quantum batteries, in which the notion of ergotropy is used to quantify a particular amount of energy that can be extracted through unitary processes. Given the total amount of energy stored in a quantum system, quantifying wasted energy after the ergotropy extraction is a question to be considered when undesired coupling with thermal reservoirs is taken into account. In this paper, we show that some amount of energy can be lost when we extract ergotropy from a quantum system and quantified by the exergy of passive states. Through a particular example, one shows that ergotropy extraction can be done by preserving the quantum correlations of a quantum system. Our study opens the perspective for new advances in open system quantum batteries able to explore exergy stored as quantum correlations.
Work extraction protocol is always a significant issue in the context of quantum batteries, in which the notion of ergotropy is used to quantify a particular amount of energy that can be extracted through unitary processes. Given the total amount of energy stored in a quantum system, quantifying wasted energy after the ergotropy extraction is a question to be considered when undesired coupling with thermal reservoirs is taken into account. In this paper, we show that some amount of energy can be lost when we extract ergotropy from a quantum system and quantified by the exergy of passive states. Through a particular example, one shows that ergotropy extraction can be done by preserving the quantum correlations of a quantum system. Our study opens the perspective for new advances in open system quantum batteries able to explore exergy stored as quantum correlations.
The study of quantum thermodynamics has led to the development of quantum batteries. These devices use quantum advantages to store and extract useful energy from physical systems. Ergotropy is the maximum work that can be extracted from a quantum system by cyclic unitary operations. When external thermal baths couple with the quantum battery, there is energy loss due to thermal effects on the system. In some cases, a part of the total energy available in the system cannot be stored as ergotropy. Therefore, it is important to consider the amount of residual energy that cannot be extracted as useful work from quantum batteries by unitary processes. To better understand the amount of energy lost during work extraction, it is necessary to examine the constraint of unitary processes. The system exergy represents the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from the system while bringing it into equilibrium with a thermal bath. It can be separated into two parts: ergotropy and residual energy. Thus, the present chapter describes the relationship between exergy and its potential benefits and effects on the performance of quantum batteries.
"A battery powers a device" can be read as "work stored in the battery is being transported to the device." In quantum batteries, the total amount of stored work can be measured by ergotropy, which is the maximal work extractable by unitary operations. Transporting ergotropy is fundamentally different from transporting energy, and here we find that ergotropy can be gained even when the transmission channel is strictly energy conserving. We show that, generically, ergotropy transport is lossy whenever the two systems start uncorrelated. In contrast, for a large class of correlated initial states, transport can be gainful. Furthermore, a single correlated state can be used multiple times, allowing to transport without losses an order of magnitude more work than the battery capacity. Correlations are thus a useful resource for ergotropy transport, and we quantify how this resource is consumed during gainful transport.
Quantum many-body scars break ergodicity and evade thermalization, resulting in sub-volume law entanglement entropy even with high energy density. While their quantum correlations and entanglement have been elaborated previously, their capacity in storing extractable energy, quantified by the notion ergotropy, remains an open question. Here we focus on the representative PXP model, and unveil the extensive ergotropy scaling of a family of states interpolating between quantum many-body scars and thermal states, the latter of which are known to be passive with vanishing ergotropy in the thermodynamic limit. A phenomenological relation between ergotropy and entanglement is uncovered, which generalizes the existing free fermion integrable results to an interacting scenario. The ergotropy in a dynamical protocol shows that a reset with a global uniform coherent rotation can inject extractable energy, as a proof of principle way to charge a quantum "battery". Our protocol is tailored for near term Rydberg neutral atoms array, while also being feasible for other quantum processors. Our results establish that quantum many-body scars, despite the tiny fraction of the Hilbert space they occupy, can be efficiently exploited for storing extractable energy, and "scarring" a many-body system as a promising route for engineering quantum many-body battery.
The amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum system can be increased by exploiting the information obtained from a measurement performed on a correlated ancillary system. The concept of daemonic ergotropy has been introduced to properly describe and quantify this work extraction enhancement in the quantum regime. We here explore the application of this idea in the context of continuously monitored open quantum systems, where information is gained by measuring the environment interacting with the energy-storing quantum device. We first show that the corresponding daemonic ergotropy takes values between the ergotropy and the energy of the corresponding unconditional state. The upper bound is achieved by assuming an initial pure state and a perfectly efficient projective measurement on the environment, independently of the kind of measurement performed. On the other hand, if the measurement is inefficient or the initial state is mixed, the daemonic ergotropy is generally dependent on the measurement strategy. This scenario is investigated via a paradigmatic example of an open quantum battery: a two-level atom driven by a classical field and whose spontaneously emitted photons are continuously monitored via either homodyne, heterodyne, or photodetection.
We explore coherent ergotropy extraction in quantum batteries from a resource-geometric point of view. For an initial state ρ, we quantify the coherent extraction process by the coherent ergotropy Ec(ρ) and the coherent extraction distance Dcext(ρ) between the active state σρ and the passive state Pρ. This defines the geometric power capacity Πc(ρ)=Ec(ρ)/Dcext(ρ), which measures the coherent ergotropy released unit minimal unitary distance. We prove that, for any driving Hamiltonian satisfying ∥Vt∥≤ν, the actual coherent discharging power is bounded by Pcext(ρ;Vt)≤νΠc(ρ), showing that Πc(ρ) is a capacity under unit driving norm rather than the power of a particular protocol. General bounds on Πc(ρ) are derived by combining relative entropy bounds on coherent ergotropy with geometric bounds on the coherent extraction distance. We also formulate coherence measure induced bounds and protocol-corrected capacities involving the effective speed of a given Hamiltonian. Qubit and qutrit examples demonstrate that Πc(ρ) captures a resource-geometric feature of coherent discharging beyond coherent ergotropy or coherence measures alone.
Ergotropy provides a fundamental measure of the extractable work from a quantum system and, consequently, of the maximal useful energy, or charge, stored within it. Understanding how this quantity can be manipulated and transformed efficiently is crucial for advancing quantum energy management technologies. Here, we introduce and formalize the concepts of isoergotropic states and ergotropy-preserving operations, which reorganize the internal structure of ergotropy while keeping its total value unchanged. These ideas are illustrated for both discrete (two-level systems) and continuous-variable systems (single-mode Gaussian states). In each case, we show how ergotropy-preserving operations redistribute the respective coherent-incoherent and displacement-squeezing components. We further examine the thermodynamic exchanges accompanying ergotropy-preserving operations, including variations in energy and entropy, and demonstrate that these transformations can be dynamically implemented through standard beam-splitter-type interactions with an auxiliary system. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of isoergotropic states and operations in optimizing charging protocols and mitigating charge loss in open quantum batteries.