Exceptional points are spectral singularities where both eigenvalues and eigenvectors collapse onto a single mode, causing the system behavior to shift abruptly and making it highly responsive to even small perturbations. Although widely studied in optical and quantum systems, using them for energy storage in quantum systems has been difficult because existing approaches rely on gain, precise balanced loss, or explicitly non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. Here we introduce a quantum energy-storage mechanism that realizes exceptional-point physics in a fully passive, physically consistent open quantum system. Instead of amplification, we use trace-preserving reservoir engineering to create an effective complex interaction between a charging mode and a storage mode through a dissipative mediator, generating an exceptional point directly in the drift matrix of the Heisenberg-Langevin equations while preserving complete positivity. The resulting dynamics exhibit two regimes: a stable phase where the stored energy saturates, and a broken phase where energy grows exponentially under a bounded coherent drive. This rapid charging arises from dissipative interference that greatly boosts energy flow between the modes without gain media or nonlinear amplification. The mechanism is compatible with optomechanical devices, superconducting circuits, and magnonic systems, offering a practical route to fast, robust, and scalable quantum energy-storage technologies and new directions in quantum thermodynamics.
Exceptional points are spectral singularities where both eigenvalues and eigenvectors collapse onto a single mode, causing the system behavior to shift abruptly and making it highly responsive to even small perturbations. Although widely studied in optical and quantum systems, using them for energy storage in quantum systems has been difficult because existing approaches rely on gain, precise balanced loss, or explicitly non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. Here we introduce a quantum energy-storage mechanism that realizes exceptional-point physics in a fully passive, physically consistent open quantum system. Instead of amplification, we use trace-preserving reservoir engineering to create an effective complex interaction between a charging mode and a storage mode through a dissipative mediator, generating an exceptional point directly in the drift matrix of the Heisenberg-Langevin equations while preserving complete positivity. The resulting dynamics exhibit two regimes: a stable phase where the stored energy saturates, and a broken phase where energy grows exponentially under a bounded coherent drive. This rapid charging arises from dissipative interference that greatly boosts energy flow between the modes without gain media or nonlinear amplification. The mechanism is compatible with optomechanical devices, superconducting circuits, and magnonic systems, offering a practical route to fast, robust, and scalable quantum energy-storage technologies and new directions in quantum thermodynamics.
Quantum batteries, which use quantum systems to store and deliver energy,
are promising for next-generation energy storage. However, optimizing charging
strategies and understanding the interplay between dissipation and quantum
coherence remain open challenges. Here, we investigate steady-state charging
in an open quantum battery and demonstrate that the charging timescale depends
on the spectral gap of the Liouvillian operator governing dissipative dynamics.
As a minimal example, we examine a three-level quantum battery realized in
a single trapped 40Ca+ ion, where energy from an
engineered thermal photon reservoir is coherently transferred to a long-lived
metastable storage state. We find that long-term dynamics are confined to
a low-dimensional manifold of slow Liouvillian modes, with their
spectral structure determining the relaxation rate to the charged
steady state. By adjusting experimentally accessible parameters,
such as reservoir occupation and coherent coupling strength, the non-Hermitian
Liouvillian spectrum can approach an exceptional point. This increases
the spectral gap and accelerates the approach to steady state. As a result,
this mechanism significantly enhances asymptotic charging power without
relying on many-body collectivity or steady coherence. Our findings offer
fundamental insights into open quantum thermodynamics and provide a path
to efficient energy storage and fast-charging solutions in emerging quantum
technologies.
Suppressing coherent energy backflow while maintaining extractable energy in a stable nonequilibrium state remains a central challenge for quantum energy storage. Here, we introduce a reservoir-engineered dual-charger quantum battery architecture, in which nonequilibrium dissipation is exploited as a control resource to stabilize useful stored energy. A hot-reservoir-coupled driver supplies excitations, while a cold-reservoir-coupled cache biases the resonant three-body transition toward charging and suppresses the dressed-state coherences responsible for energy backflow. This mechanism establishes a population-inverted steady state with finite ergotropy and converts reversible charger--battery exchange into persistent energy storage. For uniformly spaced multilevel batteries, we show that the stored energy and ergotropy scale approximately linearly with the number of accessible levels, while the stored-energy utilization approaches unity. The accompanying stationary heat current provides a thermodynamic signature of the charging regime. Our results demonstrate dissipation engineering as a strategy for achieving stable and scalable quantum energy storage beyond transient coherent charging protocols.
We propose a scheme to achieve a nonreciprocal quantum battery (QB) in the non-Hermitian (NH) system, which can overcome the intrinsic dissipation and reverse flow constraints. The design is based on a charger and a battery, which are coherently coupled and jointly interact with a bad cavity. By introducing the auxiliary bad cavity and exploiting the nonreciprocal condition, this model can harness the environmental dissipation to suppress the reverse energy transfer. Under resonant conditions, we have achieved a four ratio of the battery energy to the charger energy; in contrast, this ratio is significantly reduced under large detuning. Through damping optimization, high efficiency of the short-time charging power is attained. In comparison to the fully nonreciprocal scheme, the QB operating at the exceptional point (EP) exhibits greater resilience to parameter fluctuations. These findings highlight the potential of NH quantum engineering for advancing QB technology, particularly in regimes involving directional energy transfer, controlled dissipation, and entropy management in open quantum systems.
Charger-mediated quantum batteries offer promising opportunities for efficient energy transfer and storage at the quantum level, with potential advantages beyond their classical counterparts. Here, we theoretically demonstrate that nonlinear charger-battery interactions can substantially accelerate the charging of quantum batteries. In the weak-driving regime, sufficiently strong nonlinear coupling can dominate over the effect of dephasing and significantly reduce the charging time. In the strong- and optimal-driving regimes, where the optimal driving strength maximizes the steady-state ergotropy in the linear-coupling regime, nonlinear coupling gives rise to a new optimum in the charging time beyond that of the linear-coupling regime, accompanied by nearly critically damped dynamics. Remarkably, even in the absence of external driving, nonlinear coupling alone can substantially reduce the charging time, providing an alternative route toward fast battery charging. Our results establish nonlinear charger-battery coupling as an effective resource for accelerating quantum-battery charging and broaden the scope of interaction-enabled quantum advantages in energy transfer and storage.
Abstract We propose a scheme to achieve a nonreciprocal quantum battery (QB) in the non-Hermitian (NH) system, which can overcome the intrinsic dissipation and reverse flow constraints. The design is based on a charger and a battery, which are coherently coupled and jointly interact with a bad cavity. By introducing the auxiliary bad cavity and exploiting the nonreciprocal condition, this model can harness the environmental dissipation to suppress the reverse energy transfer. Under resonant conditions, we have achieved a four ratio of the battery energy to the charger energy; in contrast, this ratio is significantly reduced under large detuning. Through damping optimization, high efficiency of the short-time charging power is attained. In comparison to the fully nonreciprocal scheme, the QB operating at the exceptional point (EP) exhibits greater resilience to parameter fluctuations. These findings highlight the potential of NH quantum engineering for advancing QB technology, particularly in regimes involving directional energy transfer, controlled dissipation, and entropy management in open quantum systems.
A quantum battery charged through a lossy intermediate state faces a structural trade-off between charging speed and dissipation. We show that an exact algebraic cancellation removes it in a driven three-level cell: the radiatively decaying state is fed by a single bright amplitude, and a counterdiabatic field annuls the lone residual source that drives it, holding the lossy state identically empty. Charging is then lossless -- not one photon is emitted through the bridge -- at any one-photon detuning, coupling, linewidth, and speed down to the rotating-wave limit, with no adiabatic elimination, so the charging power is bounded by the drive amplitude (a quantum speed limit) rather than by dissipation. Crucially, this losslessness is independent of the reservoir: because the dark sector never engages the system-bath coupling, the emission vanishes exactly for an arbitrary spectral density, Markovian or not, as an exact damped-pseudomode treatment confirms to machine precision across all memory times. The entire non-Hermitian structure -- a Markovian second-order exceptional point that reservoir memory promotes to a third-order one, and the attendant dissipation phase diagram -- lives in the bright sector, from which the protocol is by construction exempt. This inverts dissipation-engineered charging, where an exceptional point or reservoir memory is a resource; here the lossy sector is never populated at all. The same dark-state structure protects the stored charge, converting fast radiative self-discharge into the slow metastable lifetime, with residuals quadratic in the control error. We detail experimental requirements and representative parameters for neutral alkaline-earth atoms, trapped ions, transmons, and defect centers.