Identifying the physical origin of enhanced charging performance in many-body quantum batteries is a key challenge in quantum thermodynamics. We investigate whether improvements in stored energy and instantaneous charging power arise from genuine quantum correlations or from coherent collective dynamics that are not intrinsically quantum. We compare the time evolution of energetic quantities with a hierarchy of information-theoretic measures probing bipartite, tripartite, and further-partite correlations. Across different battery charger configurations, we find a consistent temporal ordering in which the instantaneous power peaks before the buildup of strong quantum correlations, indicating that peak charging is dominated by coherent transport, while entanglement and scrambling develop at later times. Furthermore, charging protocols based on k local interactions are examined under both unconstrained and norm-constrained (fair) settings, enabling a clear distinction between classical scaling effects and genuine collective enhancements. Increasing the interaction order or the participation number does not automatically translate into higher charging power. Instead, the performance is primarily dictated by how many particles actually become mutually correlated and contribute to entanglement. Fully collective interactions provide a genuine advantage because all particles participate coherently, whereas partially extended interaction schemes fail to monotonically increase the number of effectively interacting particles, and therefore do not guarantee improved charging efficiency.
Identifying the physical origin of enhanced charging performance in many-body quantum batteries is a key challenge in quantum thermodynamics. We investigate whether improvements in stored energy and instantaneous charging power arise from genuine quantum correlations or from coherent collective dynamics that are not intrinsically quantum. We compare the time evolution of energetic quantities with a hierarchy of information-theoretic measures probing bipartite, tripartite, and further-partite correlations. Across different battery charger configurations, we find a consistent temporal ordering in which the instantaneous power peaks before the buildup of strong quantum correlations, indicating that peak charging is dominated by coherent transport, while entanglement and scrambling develop at later times. Furthermore, charging protocols based on k local interactions are examined under both unconstrained and norm-constrained (fair) settings, enabling a clear distinction between classical scaling effects and genuine collective enhancements. Increasing the interaction order or the participation number does not automatically translate into higher charging power. Instead, the performance is primarily dictated by how many particles actually become mutually correlated and contribute to entanglement. Fully collective interactions provide a genuine advantage because all particles participate coherently, whereas partially extended interaction schemes fail to monotonically increase the number of effectively interacting particles, and therefore do not guarantee improved charging efficiency.
Quantum batteries provide a platform for investigating energy storage and extraction in quantum many-body systems. Here, we study a charging protocol in which battery and chargoid roles are assigned to different Hamiltonian components of a standalone many-body spin system. By externally controlling the contribution of the intrinsic battery Hamiltonian during charging, we reveal a tunable competition between intrinsic and charging dynamics. We find that suppressing the intrinsic battery contribution can substantially enhance both the maximum stored energy and charging power, with the magnitude of the enhancement determined by the interaction structure and range. We further investigate the protocol in a Markovian open-system setting that incorporates energy relaxation and pure dephasing. While environmental effects generally degrade charging performance, they can instead enhance energy-storage and energy-extraction dynamics in certain interacting systems. The enhancement associated with the controlled suppression of the intrinsic battery dynamics remains robust in the presence of environmental coupling.
While quantum batteries have been widely studied under static driving, their performance under periodic driving in many-body systems has received only limited attention. In this Letter, we uncover structural principles showing that many-body structure fundamentally determines the charging performance of a collective spin-1/2 quantum battery driven by a periodic Ising charger. In particular, interaction range, boundary conditions, system size, and integrability -- capturing graph connectivity, geometry, even-odd effects, and many-body dynamics -- emerge as critical factors for enhancing stored energy and charging power. First, we analyze how connectivity scaling and boundary geometry shape battery performance. We show that long-range interacting chargers exhibit superextensive energy storage, approaching the fundamental upper bound over broad ranges of driving periods and system sizes. In contrast, nearest-neighbor chargers achieve optimal charging only under finely tuned commensurability conditions. Moreover, we find that open boundary conditions (OBC) enhance robustness compared to periodic boundary conditions (PBC). Second, we examine the role of integrability under periodic driving. We demonstrate that nonintegrability enhances energy storage by suppressing conserved quantities and promoting ergodic Floquet dynamics, thereby enabling efficient population of the many-body spectrum. Through systematic structural optimization across multiple parameters, we identify long-range nonintegrability as a central resource for fast, scalable, and robust charging of collective quantum batteries. Our results clarify how structural features of many-body systems, together with periodic driving, can be harnessed to achieve efficient collective charging dynamics.
In this work, we investigate the autonomous charging process of a quantum battery coupled to a structured reservoir composed of two qubits, each locally coupled to its own bosonic thermal bath. Moreover, the reservoir interacts with a charger-battery architecture through three configurations: (I) direct coupling between reservoir qubits and battery; (II) collective coupling among the reservoir qubits, charger, and battery; and (III) a collective coupling between the reservoir qubits and charger together with a local charger-battery interaction. However, by using incoherent and coherent initial states, we analyze the stored energy, ergotropy, and charging power of the battery, and derive upper and lower bounds on the extractable work in terms of the free energy of coherence and the correlations exchanged between subsystems. Our results show that global and local coherences, as well as total correlations, act as quantum resources that enhance autonomous charging. Additionally, we demonstrate that the free energy stored in the quantum battery splits into contributions from coherence and correlations, providing numerical evidence that supports the derived ergotropy bounds. Importantly, this work highlights how structured reservoirs enable autonomous and resource-enhanced quantum battery operation.
Quantum batteries (QBs) exploit principles of quantum mechanics to accelerate the charging process and aim to achieve optimal energy storage. However, analytical results for investigating these problems remain lacking due to the challenges associated with nonequilibrium dynamics. In this work we analytically investigate a central-spin QB model in which Nb spin-21 battery cells interact with Nc spin-21 charger units, using m initially excited charger units as a resource. By employing the invariant subspace method and the shifted Holstein-Primakoff transformation, we identify four scenarios in which optimal energy storage can be achieved: (i) ${N}_{b}\ensuremath{\ll}m\ensuremath{\ll}{N}_{c}$, (ii) $m\ensuremath{\ll}{N}_{b}\ensuremath{\ll}{N}_{c}$, (iii) $m\ensuremath{\ll}{N}_{c}\ensuremath{\ll}{N}_{b}$, and (iv) ${N}_{b}\ensuremath{\ll}m=k{N}_{c} [k\ensuremath{\in}(0,1)]$. In these cases, optimal storage is ensured by the SU(2) symmetry emerging from the charging dynamics. The first three cases map the central-spin QB to different Tavis-Cummings (TC) QBs, while the fourth corresponds to the non-TC limit. We analytically determine the charging time and demonstrate that in the fully charging cases (i) and (iv), the collective charging exhibits an Nb-fold enhancement in speedup compared to the parallel charging scheme. Additionally, we numerically observe a unified charging behavior when m=Nc, showing that asymptotically optimal energy storage is possible when Nb=m=Nc. In this case, we find a collective charging enhancement scaling as Nb0.8264. The origin of the collective charging advantage in central-spin quantum batteries is also analyzed through the quantum speed limit and a multipartite entanglement witness. Our results highlight the crucial role of dynamically emergent SU(2) symmetry in providing an analytical understanding of nonequilibrium charging dynamics in QBs.
Quantum batteries can outperform their classical counterparts through collective quantum effects, yet the conditions enabling such advantage remain unclear. Using a generic class of free-fermionic chargers we prove that global operators are insufficient for scalable superextensive charging and that a cumulative hierarchy of many-body operators is required, with the structure of the battery determining the degree of advantage. This is obtained by relating the charging power to the norm of the commutator between the battery and charger Hamiltonians and deriving an upper bound only capturing noncommuting terms. Moreover, we revisit the concept of participation number and propose an effective definition that accounts for the relative strength of the contributing terms, correlating it with the charging power scaling. Not limited to quadratic Hamiltonians, our results establish cumulative locality as a key resource for quantum charging advantage.
Quantum battery works as a micro- or nanodevice to store and redistribute energy at the quantum level. Here we propose a spin-charger protocol, in which the battery cells are charged by a finite number of spins through a general Heisenberg XY interaction. Under the isotropic interaction, the spin-charger protocol is endowed with a higher capacity in terms of the maximum stored energy than the conventional protocols, where the battery is charged by a continuous-variable system, e.g., a cavity mode. By tuning the charger size, a tradeoff between the maximum stored energy and the average charging power is found in comparison to the cavity-charger protocol in the Tavis-Cummings model. Quantum advantage of our protocol is manifested by the scaling behavior of the optimal average power with respect to the battery size, in comparing the collective charging scheme to its parallel counterpart. We also discuss the detrimental effect on the charging performance from the anisotropic interaction between the battery and the charger, the nonideal initial states for both of them, and the crosstalk among the charger spins. A strong charger-charger interaction can be used to decouple the battery and the charger. Our findings about the advantages of the spin-charger protocol over the conventional cavity-charger protocols, including the high capacity of energy storage and the superior power law in the collective charging, provide an insight to exploit an efficient quantum battery based on the spin-spin-environment model.