Reliable charging protocols are crucial for advancing quantum batteries toward practical use. We investigate a transverse-field Ising chain as a quantum battery, focusing on the combined role of qubit interactions in the battery model and finite charging time. This interplay yields smoother and more controllable charging compared to sudden protocols or non-interacting batteries. Introducing stochastic noise reveals a strong dependence on the charging trajectory. Protocols that weakly excite the system gain energy under noise but lose extractable work. In contrast, protocols that strongly excite many modes show the opposite trend: noise reduces stored energy yet improves efficiency, defined as the ratio of ergotropy to stored energy. These findings demonstrate that finite-time ramps stabilize charging and highlight that noise can either hinder or enhance quantum-battery performance depending on the protocol.
Reliable charging protocols are crucial for advancing quantum batteries toward practical use. We investigate a transverse-field Ising chain as a quantum battery, focusing on the combined role of qubit interactions in the battery model and finite charging time. This interplay yields smoother and more controllable charging compared to sudden protocols or non-interacting batteries. Introducing stochastic noise reveals a strong dependence on the charging trajectory. Protocols that weakly excite the system gain energy under noise but lose extractable work. In contrast, protocols that strongly excite many modes show the opposite trend: noise reduces stored energy yet improves efficiency, defined as the ratio of ergotropy to stored energy. These findings demonstrate that finite-time ramps stabilize charging and highlight that noise can either hinder or enhance quantum-battery performance depending on the protocol.
Quantum batteries, which are energy-storage or state-storage devices that exploit unique quantum effects, are sensitive to environmental noise. Here, we demonstrate that suitably engineered noise can induce a "Zeno-like" stabilization effect of the charging process in a spin-chain quantum battery within the Heisenberg XYZ model. Focusing on a system size N=6, which balances computational cost and storage capacity, we find that the ergotropy-to-energy ratio W(t)/E_B(t) attains a maximum value of about 0.99 at a certain time parameter value. Then, by varying the noise strength in each channel, we find that not only does decoherence merely degrade performance but it may also stabilize stored energy and ergotropy in the high noise strength regime. For instance, the phase-flip channel slows charging and reduces charging power, but its discharging behavior releases energy and ergotropy more slowly, allowing the battery to be used for longer times compared to bit-flip and bit-phase-flip channels. In contrast, the bit-flip channel enables fast charging, but yields low storage and rapid energy release. Remarkably, the bit-phase-flip channel can combine the advantages of both bit-flip and phase-flip channels in the high-noise-strength regime. The bit-phase-flip channel supports accelerated charging together with enhanced storage capacity, while its discharging behavior resembles that of the bit-flip channel with rapid energy release. These results reveal that, under sufficiently strong noise, environmental decoherence induces a Zeno-like stabilization, allowing it to achieve enhanced charging performance and to stabilize stored energy and ergotropy in the spin-chain quantum battery.
We study a quantum battery consisting of N qubits interacting uniformly with each other. Starting from its ground state, the battery is charged by introducing periodic kicks in the transverse direction along with adding disorder in the interaction direction. Although the battery Hamiltonian along with the initial state preserves the permutation symmetry, the dynamics in presence of disorder during the charging phase takes the system out of the permutation symmetric subspace, resulting to a larger amount of stored energy as compared to that without disorder. In the limit of large disorder, this interplay brings in a possibility of a chaotic charging phase when stored energy can be exactly calculated using random matrix theory. More importantly, we also find that the energy fluctuations decrease and become negligible in the limit of large disorder, which is also when the energy stored is maximum, a condition highly desirable for the optimum functioning of the battery. We complete the battery cycle by considering the storage phase in the presence of dephasing noise. We find that for larger disorder strengths, the ergotropy remains close to the stored energy, indicating nearly complete energy extractability with an efficiency approaching unity.
Abstract We consider a quantum battery (QB) composed of a pair of qubits coupled with an Ising interaction in the usual NMR framework, where the longitudinal applied field is constant and the time-dependent variables controlling the system are the amplitude and phase of the transverse field, and use optimal control to derive fast charging protocols. We study both the cases where the Ising coupling is weaker and stronger than the longitudinal field. In the first case, where the lowest-energy state of the system is the spin-down state, the optimal charging protocol stipulates the transverse field amplitude to be constant and equal to its maximum allowed value, while the minimum time for full charging of the battery tends to zero as this maximum bound increases. In the second case, where the lowest-energy state is a maximally entangled Bell state, the optimal charging protocol includes a time interval where the transverse field amplitude is zero and its phase is immaterial, corresponding to singular control. In this case, the QB can be charged with higher levels of stored energy, while the minimum time for full charging tends to a nonzero limit proportional to the inverse Ising interaction, as the maximum bound of the control amplitude increases. We analyze intuitively and quantitatively the distinct behavior of the two cases and additionally use the dynamical Lie algebra of the system to elucidate the presence of a singular arc in the optimal pulse-sequence in the second case. The discovered interplay between the QB parameters, the stored energy and the minimum time for full charging, provides great flexibility for optimizing the performance of the device according to the operating constraints. The valuable insights gained regarding the design of QBs is expected to find immediate applications in modern quantum science and technology, while we aim to extend the proposed methods to larger spin chains.
Quantum batteries, microscopic devices designed to address energy demands in quantum technologies, promise high power during charging and discharging processes. Yet their practical usefulness and performance depend critically on reliability, quantified by the noise-to-signal ratios (NSRs), i.e., normalized fluctuations of work and power, where reliability decreases inversely with increasing NSR. We establish fundamental limits to this reliability: both work and power NSRs are universally bounded from below by a function of charging speed, imposing a reliability limit inherent to any quantum battery. More strikingly, we find that a quantum mechanical uncertainty relation forbids the simultaneous suppression of work and power fluctuations, revealing a fundamental trade-off that also limits the reliability of quantum batteries. We analyze the trade-off and limits, as well as their scaling behavior, across parallel (local), collective {(fully non-local)}, and hybrid (semi-local) charging schemes for many-body quantum batteries, finding that increasing power by exploiting stronger entanglement comes at the cost of diminished reliability of power. Similar trends are also observed in the charging of quantum batteries utilizing transverse Ising-like interactions. These suggest that achieving both high power and reliability require neither parallel nor collective charging, but a hybrid charging scheme with an intermediate range of interactions. Therefore, our analysis shapes the practical and efficient design of reliable and high-performance quantum batteries.
Protecting quantum batteries from environmental noise remains a challenge. Using exact Burshtein-Kubo equations, we study a two-spin quantum battery with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) coupling under indepen dent local longitudinal random telegraph noise (RTN). At a fixed effective noise scale, the DM-assisted slow switching protocol yields a superadditive transient ergotropy gain and near-maximal ergotropy during the initial charging stage, while the no-DM slow-switching control reaches comparable ergotropy only in a later revival. A finite superadditive region persists at fixed RTN amplitude, with protocol-dependent location and gain. In the Ising model, the enhancement is nonmonotonic in DM strength, with intermediate coupling giving near-optimal performance. Dressed-channel analysis associates this enhancement with changes in transition frequencies and longitudinal-noise matrix elements that reduce slow-RTN spectral weight. Superadditivity also persists in the tested anisotropic XY model.
We investigate the performance of a quantum battery exposed to local Markovian and non-Markovian dephasing noises. The battery is initially prepared as the ground state of a one-dimensional transverse XY model with open boundary condition and is charged (discharged) via interactions with local bosonic reservoirs. We show that in the transient regime, the quantum battery (QB) can store energy faster and has a higher maximum extractable work, quantified via ergotropy, when it is affected by local phase-flip or bit-flip Markovian noise compared to the case when there is no noise in the system. In both the charging and discharging processes, we report the enhancement in work output as well as in ergotropy when all the spins are affected by a non-Markovian Ohmic bath in both the transient and the steady-state regimes, thereby showing a counterintuitive advantage of decoherence in the QB. In both Markovian and non-Markovian cases, we identify the system parameters and the corresponding noise models which lead to maximum enhancement of work output and ergotropy. Moreover, we show that the benefit due to noise persists even with the initial state being prepared at a moderate temperature.