Abstract Starting from the observation that the reduced state of a system strongly coupled to a bath is, in general, an athermal state, we introduce and study a cyclic battery–charger quantum device that is in thermal equilibrium, or in a ground state, during the charge storing stage. The cycle has four stages: the equilibrium storage stage is interrupted by disconnecting the battery from the charger, then work is extracted from the battery, and then the battery is reconnected with the charger; finally, the system is brought back to equilibrium. At no point during the cycle are the battery–charger correlations artificially erased. We study the case where the battery and charger together comprise a spin-1/2 Ising chain, and show that the main characteristics—the extracted energy and the thermodynamic efficiency—can be enhanced by operating the cycle close to the quantum phase transition point. When the battery is just a single spin, we find that the output work and efficiency show a scaling behavior at criticality and derive the corresponding critical exponents. Due to always present correlations between the battery and the charger, operations that are equivalent from the perspective of the battery can entail different energetic costs for switching the battery–charger coupling. This happens only when the coupling term does not commute with the battery’s bare Hamiltonian, and we use this purely quantum leverage to further optimize the performance of the device.
Abstract Starting from the observation that the reduced state of a system strongly coupled to a bath is, in general, an athermal state, we introduce and study a cyclic battery–charger quantum device that is in thermal equilibrium, or in a ground state, during the charge storing stage. The cycle has four stages: the equilibrium storage stage is interrupted by disconnecting the battery from the charger, then work is extracted from the battery, and then the battery is reconnected with the charger; finally, the system is brought back to equilibrium. At no point during the cycle are the battery–charger correlations artificially erased. We study the case where the battery and charger together comprise a spin-1/2 Ising chain, and show that the main characteristics—the extracted energy and the thermodynamic efficiency—can be enhanced by operating the cycle close to the quantum phase transition point. When the battery is just a single spin, we find that the output work and efficiency show a scaling behavior at criticality and derive the corresponding critical exponents. Due to always present correlations between the battery and the charger, operations that are equivalent from the perspective of the battery can entail different energetic costs for switching the battery–charger coupling. This happens only when the coupling term does not commute with the battery’s bare Hamiltonian, and we use this purely quantum leverage to further optimize the performance of the device.
Starting from the observation that the reduced state of a system strongly coupled to a bath is, in general, an athermal state, we introduce and study a cyclic battery-charger quantum device that is in thermal equilibrium, or in a ground state, during the charge storing stage. The cycle has four stages: the equilibrium storage stage is interrupted by disconnecting the battery from the charger, then work is extracted from the battery, and then the battery is reconnected with the charger; finally, the system is brought back to equilibrium. At no point during the cycle are the battery-charger correlations artificially erased. We study the case where the battery and charger together comprise a spin-1/2 Ising chain, and show that the main characteristics-the extracted energy and the thermodynamic efficiency-can be enhanced by operating the cycle close to the quantum phase transition point. When the battery is just a single spin, we find that the output work and efficiency show a scaling behavior at criticality and derive the corresponding critical exponents. Due to always present correlations between the battery and the charger, operations that are equivalent from the perspective of the battery can entail different energetic costs for switching the battery-charger coupling. This happens only when the coupling term does not commute with the battery's bare Hamiltonian, and we use this purely quantum leverage to further optimize the performance of the device.
Abstract The reduced state of a small system strongly coupled to a charger in thermal equilibrium may be athermal and used as a small battery once disconnected. By harnessing the battery-charger correlations, the battery’s extractable energy can increase above the ergotropy. We introduce a protocol that uses a quantum system as a memory that measures the charger and leaves the battery intact in its charged state. Using the information gained from the measurement, the daemonic ergotropy of the battery is extracted. Then the battery is reconnected to the charger, thermalizing and charging it. However, the memory should return to its initial standard state to close the thermodynamic cycle. Thus, on the one hand, the work cost of the cycle is the sum of the disconnecting and reconnecting battery-charger work plus the measurement and erasure work. On the other hand, the extracted energy is the daemonic ergotropy of the battery plus the ergotropy of the memory. The ratio of these quantities defines the efficiency of the cycle. The protocol is exemplified by a modified transverse spin 1/2 Ising chain, one spin functioning as the battery and the others as the charger. The memory is another auxiliary spin 1/2. We found pairs of measurement schemes from which we extract the same daemonic ergotropy from the battery, they dissipate the same amount of energy, and one leaves the memory in an active state, the other in a passive state. We study the memory’s ergotropy and the daemonic ergotropy of the battery. We find that with measurements, the efficiency can surpass that of the unmeasured protocol, given conditions on temperature, coupling, and choice of the measurement operators.
Abstract We introduce a cyclic quantum battery QB model, based on an interacting bipartite system, weakly coupled to a thermal bath. The working cycle of the battery consists of four strokes: system thermalization, disconnection of subsystems, ergotropy extraction, and reconnection. The thermal bath acts as a charger in the thermalization stroke, while ergotropy extraction is possible because the ensuing thermal state is no longer passive after the disconnection stroke. Focusing on the case of two interacting qubits, we show that phase coherence, in the presence of non-trivial correlations between the qubits, can be exploited to reach working regimes with efficiency higher than 50% while providing finite ergotropy. Our protocol is illustrated through a simple and feasible circuit model of a cyclic superconducting QB. Furthermore, we simulate the considered cycle on superconducting IBM quantum machines. The good agreement between the theoretical and simulated results strongly suggests that our scheme for cyclic QBs can be successfully realized in superconducting quantum hardware.
Abstract The reduced state of a small system strongly coupled to a thermal bath may be athermal and used as a small battery once disconnected. The unitarily extractable energy (a.k.a. ergotropy) will be negligible if the disconnecting process is too slow. To study the efficiency of this battery, we consider the cycle of disconnecting, extracting, and connecting the battery back to the bath. Efficiency, i.e. the ratio between ergotropy and connecting plus disconnecting work, is a function of disconnecting time. We consider the Caldeira–Leggett model of a quantum battery in two scenarios. In the first scenario, we assume that the discharged battery is uncorrelated to the bath when connecting back and find that the efficiency peaks at an optimal disconnecting time. In the second scenario, the discharged battery is correlated to the bath, and see that the optimal efficiency corresponds to an instantaneous disconnection. On top of these results, we analyze various thermodynamic quantities for these Caldeira–Leggett quantum batteries and express the first and second laws of thermodynamics for the cycles in simple form despite the system-bath initial correlations and strong coupling regime of the working device.
We investigate a two-qubit quantum battery where coherent charger-battery coupling competes with non-Markovian environmental interactions. By tuning the coupling strengths and detuning, we identify regimes in which environmental memory enhances energy storage and charging power, while strong dissipation suppresses ergotropy by driving the battery into passive states. We show that detuning plays a dual role: reducing dissipation and inducing a phase shift in the memory kernel that controls the interference between coherent energy exchange and environment-induced backflow. As a result, although the stored energy varies smoothly, the extractable work exhibits a discontinuous onset at a critical detuning, signaling a first-order phase transition in ergotropy. The corresponding phase diagram in the coupling-detuning plane reveals a sharp boundary between thermodynamically inactive and work-producing regimes. Our results demonstrate that phase-controlled coherence and non-Markovianity provide a powerful mechanism for optimizing work extraction in open quantum batteries, offering practical strategies for noise-resilient quantum energy storage.
Abstract Quantum batteries (QBs)—small-scale energy storage devices based on quantum systems—offer the potential for enhanced charging performance through quantum effects such as coherence and collectivity. In this work, we study the collective charging of QBs consisting of N qubits, coupled to a driven qubit charger in a star configuration, with controlled pure dephasing acting on the charger. We investigate how an ‘asymptotic freedom’-like behavior—in which all the energy deposited into the battery can be extracted as work, resulting in the ergotropy-to-energy ratio approaching unity—can emerge in the steady state of the battery. We show that the ergotropy-to-energy ratio increases with the number of qubits and approaches unity asymptotically as 1 − O ( 1 / N ) . In the large- N limit, the emergence of approximate ground-state degeneracy of the collective battery system leads to this asymptotic freedom behavior, despite the battery state remaining mixed. We also discuss the scaling behavior of the charging time of the battery with N .