We investigate the photon-mediated thermal transport between a superconducting electrode and a normal metal. When the quasiparticle contribution can be neglected, the photon-mediated channel becomes an efficient heat transport relaxation process for the superconductor at low temperatures, being larger than the intrinsic contribution due to the electron–phonon interaction. Furthermore, the superconductor–normal metal system acts as a nearly perfect thermal diode, with a rectification factor up to 108 for a realistic aluminum superconductor. The rectification factor can also be tuned in a phase-controlled fashion through a non-galvanic coupling, realized by changing the magnetic flux piercing a superconducting quantum interference device, which modifies the coupling impedance between the superconductor and the normal metal. The scheme can be exploited for passive cooling in superconducting quantum circuits by transferring heat toward normal metallic pads where it dissipates more efficiently or for more general thermal management purposes.
Abstract In developing technologies based on superconducting quantum circuits, the need to control and route heating is a significant challenge in the experimental realisation and operation of these devices. One of the more ubiquitous devices in the current quantum computing toolbox is the transmon-type superconducting quantum bit, embedded in a resonator-based architecture. In the study of heat transport in superconducting circuits, a versatile and sensitive thermometer is based on studying the tunnelling characteristics of superconducting probes weakly coupled to a normal-metal island. Here we show that by integrating superconducting quantum bit coupled to two superconducting resonators at different frequencies, each resonator terminated (and thermally populated) by such a mesoscopic thin film metal island, one can experimentally observe magnetic flux-tunable photonic heat rectification between 0 and 10%.
We investigate thermal rectification and its thermodynamic cost in a three-qubit XXZ spin chain coupled to three thermal reservoirs: two local baths attached to the boundary qubits and a collective bath jointly coupled to the middle and right qubits. This asymmetric dissipative architecture allows the collective environment to actively reshape energy transport. We show that the heat current carried by the collective bath changes sign as its temperature is varied, and that the spin-chain anisotropy provides an effective internal control parameter for suppressing the boundary heat currents. These features yield thermal rectification coefficients of about
3.36% at maximum bias and up to
20.1% in the strongly anisotropic regime, although the latter comes at the cost of severely reduced heat currents. Beyond rectification, we evaluate the steady-state entropy production rate and identify a low-irreversibility operating window near the collective-current reversal, whereas increasing the local boundary couplings monotonically raises the thermodynamic cost. Our results establish collective dissipation as a tunable control mechanism for quantum heat transport and uncover a nontrivial trade-off among rectification, heat-current magnitude, and irreversible losses.