We investigate the role of symmetry-protected dark states and metastable-like frozen states in the autonomous charging dynamics of open quantum batteries described by a transverse-field Ising model. By comparing local and collective dissipation over a range of system sizes, temperatures, and magnetic phases, we demonstrate that collective dissipation generates symmetry-protected dark states together with a much larger set of frozen (metastable) states, forming an extended protected Hilbert space. We derive the multiplicity of the collective dark sector analytically, showing that it follows the Catalan sequence for even system sizes, while such states are absent for odd sizes. Our results show that collective dissipation can enhance ergotropy and charging power, with its advantage depending on temperature, magnetic phase, and system size. While the number of dark and frozen states is identical in the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases, the achievable ergotropy differs substantially because of the different spectral locations of these protected states. In particular, the antiferromagnetic configuration exhibits considerably larger extractable work owing to the favorable positioning of the protected subspaces within the many-body energy spectrum. Finally, we analyze the active Hilbert-space fraction and show that metastable protection provides an effective mechanism for suppressing dissipative losses while preserving efficient charging pathways. These results establish the dark-state and frozen-state sectors as key resources for optimizing the performance of open quantum batteries through engineered dissipation.
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This work has been submitted as a preprint on arXiv and is intended for future publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The authors retain all rights for formal publication
We investigate the role of symmetry-protected dark states and metastable-like frozen states in the autonomous charging dynamics of open quantum batteries described by a transverse-field Ising model. By comparing local and collective dissipation over a range of system sizes, temperatures, and magnetic phases, we demonstrate that collective dissipation generates symmetry-protected dark states together with a much larger set of frozen (metastable) states, forming an extended protected Hilbert space. We derive the multiplicity of the collective dark sector analytically, showing that it follows the Catalan sequence for even system sizes, while such states are absent for odd sizes. Our results show that collective dissipation can enhance ergotropy and charging power, with its advantage depending on temperature, magnetic phase, and system size. While the number of dark and frozen states is identical in the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases, the achievable ergotropy differs substantially because of the different spectral locations of these protected states. In particular, the antiferromagnetic configuration exhibits considerably larger extractable work owing to the favorable positioning of the protected subspaces within the many-body energy spectrum. Finally, we analyze the active Hilbert-space fraction and show that metastable protection provides an effective mechanism for suppressing dissipative losses while preserving efficient charging pathways. These results establish the dark-state and frozen-state sectors as key resources for optimizing the performance of open quantum batteries through engineered dissipation.
We investigate work extraction in open quantum batteries composed of interacting spin chains weakly coupled to engineered environments. Focusing on two- and four-qubit XX models initially prepared in thermal Gibbs states, we analyze how dissipation and dephasing, acting either locally or collectively, can generate and shape ergotropy during both transient and steady-state dynamics. By introducing a continuous interpolation between parallel and collective noise channels, we systematically characterize the impact of environmental structure on work extractability. We show that purely dissipative dynamics can activate finite ergotropy from completely passive thermal states, giving rise to temperature-dependent transient regimes where hotter initial states temporarily outperform colder ones in an ergotropic Mpemba-like fashion. In contrast, collective dissipation leads to steady states whose passivity crucially depends on the initial temperature and system size, a behavior we trace back to the emergence of non-trivial dark subspaces. Finally, we demonstrate that dephasing channels suppress both transient advantages and steady-state work extraction, highlighting the qualitative difference between dissipative and dephasing environments.
In this dissertation, we investigate the charging and discharging dynamics of a quantum battery composed of a collectively driven ensemble of N identical two level systems coupled to a structured electromagnetic environment. The system is described using collective angular momentum operators in the Dicke basis, which provides a compact and physically transparent framework for analyzing collective light-matter interactions. Rather than treating dissipation as an unwanted source of loss, we explicitly use it as a mechanism for energy storage and work extraction. Starting from a coherently driven ensemble coupled to common reservoirs, we derive a master equation in Lindblad form under the Born-Markov and secular approximations. In the dressed-state basis, spontaneous emission induces irreversible transitions that can increase the energy stored in the bare basis. We obtain analytic expressions for the steady state, including the stored energy and the ergotropy, and identify parameter regimes where substantial collective coherence is generated. A central result of this work is the demonstration that, in the extensive regime where the total energy scales linearly with N and relative fluctuations vanish, the charging power scales as N2. This quadratic enhancement scaling exceeds the N3/2 limit previously established for purely Hamiltonian charging protocols of noninteracting Dicke batteries in the same regime. We show that this enhancement is consistent with quantum speed limits for open-system dynamics and originates from collectively enhanced dissipative processes analogous to superradiance. We further analyze the extraction process and show that the charged steady state stores not only energy but a macroscopic collective dipole moment. This coherence enables rapid energy release through either collective spontaneous emission or stimulated emission driven by an external coherent field. In the appropriate large N extensive regime, the stored energy can become fully extractable in principle, and the discharging power also exhibits N2 scaling. These results establish that dissipative protocols can provide a genuine collective advantage over Hamiltonian schemes in the extensive regime, while also highlighting the interplay between enhanced collective power and the conditions required to achieve high extractable energy.
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.
Quantum batteries utilize nonclassical resources to achieve charging speed and energy storage performances that surpass classical thermodynamic limits. However, the practical realization of quantum batteries is often constrained by the inevitable environment-induced dissipation of both stored ergotropy and coherence. To actively counteract these losses, we propose a dual-channel coherence framework that exploits dark-state protection to stabilize ergotropy. We conduct, for the first time, an investigation of the synergistic interplay between internal charger coherence and reservoir squeezing, the latter acting as a source of external coherence. In the resource-efficient regime where charger and battery sizes are comparable, our study shows that internal charger coherence and reservoir squeezing jointly enhance the transient charging power. Crucially, initial charger coherence is the fundamental resource for maximizing and stabilizing steady-state ergotropy through dark-state protection. Our analysis reveals that these advantages are driven by the buildup of local battery coherence, which emerges from the integration of both internal and external coherence sources. These results offer a robust pathway for high-power, stabilized energy storage in quantum architectures.
ABSTRACT We investigate a quantum battery within an open quantum system, in which a harmonic oscillator acts as the charger and two‐level atoms serve as battery cells. This model accounts for the dissipative effects arising from the coupling between both the charger and battery cells with the environment. By analyzing the time evolution of the battery energy, charging power, ergotropy, and logarithmic negativity, we systematically examine the influence of the number of battery cells and environmental dissipation on battery performance. Our results show that increasing significantly enhances the charging power, exhibiting a collective enhancement effect. Both the atomic number and environmental dissipation strongly affect the ergotropy per atom, but their influences are distinct.
We analyse a two-cavity architecture, in which a lossy cavity hosting N qubits is coherently coupled to an auxiliary cavity, as a resource for the storage phase of an open quantum battery at non-zero temperature. Within a local Lindblad treatment in the resonant configuration, we find that the inter-cavity coupling enhances the suppression of self-discharging across every initial preparation, battery size, and temperature we examine, with the protection degrading smoothly as the mean thermal occupation increases. For a single qubit, the energy-basis coherence of a pure superposition leads to better long-time retention than fully excited state, highlighting the beneficial role of quantum coherence in protecting stored energy against thermal degradation. For two-qubit batteries, Bell-state preparations exhibit enhanced long-time ergotropy retention compared with the fully excited state, while the inclusion of qubit-qubit interactions produces only a weak dependence on the interaction type and strength within the parameter regime considered. Extending the analysis to multi-qubit GHZ-charged batteries with all-to-all Heisenberg interactions, we find that the normalized retained ergotropy increases monotonically with the number of qubits. This behavior is consistent with the collective enhancement of the qubit-cavity coupling in the symmetric Dicke manifold, indicating that larger quantum batteries can benefit from improved protection against self-discharge. These findings establish cavity-assisted protection as a promising strategy for mitigating self-discharging and realizing of long-lived quantum batteries in experimentally accessible platforms.