ABSTRACT A solvable charger–battery model is introduced in which quantum coherence controls both where a quantum battery's charge is stored and how robustly it survives noise. Charging converts the charger's coherence into charger–battery entanglement and splits the deposited work between a locally extractable part and a correlation‐locked part accessible only through joint operations; for a qubit, the split obeys an exact complementarity, and at maximal coherence, the battery is locally passive with the entire charge locked in correlations. Robustness follows local accessibility: the stored energy and locally extractable work are population‐based, immune to pure dephasing, and limited only by relaxation, with an energy half‐life, whereas the correlation‐locked work is fragile to both dephasing and relaxation. Dephasing, global and local depolarization, and amplitude damping are treated through a single gain–loss competition algebra, and the resulting storage lifetimes are made concrete with superconducting‐transmon parameters.
ABSTRACT A solvable charger–battery model is introduced in which quantum coherence controls both where a quantum battery's charge is stored and how robustly it survives noise. Charging converts the charger's coherence into charger–battery entanglement and splits the deposited work between a locally extractable part and a correlation‐locked part accessible only through joint operations; for a qubit, the split obeys an exact complementarity, and at maximal coherence, the battery is locally passive with the entire charge locked in correlations. Robustness follows local accessibility: the stored energy and locally extractable work are population‐based, immune to pure dephasing, and limited only by relaxation, with an energy half‐life, whereas the correlation‐locked work is fragile to both dephasing and relaxation. Dephasing, global and local depolarization, and amplitude damping are treated through a single gain–loss competition algebra, and the resulting storage lifetimes are made concrete with superconducting‐transmon parameters.
A solvable charger--battery model is introduced in which quantum coherence controls both where a quantum battery's charge is stored and how robustly it survives noise. Charging converts the charger's coherence into charger--battery entanglement and splits the deposited work between a locally extractable part and a correlation-locked part accessible only through joint operations; for a qubit, the split obeys an exact complementarity, and at maximal coherence, the battery is locally passive with the entire charge locked in correlations. Robustness follows local accessibility: the stored energy and locally extractable work are population-based, immune to pure dephasing, and limited only by relaxation, with an energy half-life, whereas the correlation-locked work is fragile to both dephasing and relaxation. Dephasing, global and local depolarization, and amplitude damping are treated through a single gain--loss competition algebra, and the resulting storage lifetimes are made concrete with superconducting-transmon parameters.
Charging a quantum battery through a pumped charger can lock a substantial part of its stored energy inside the bipartite correlations that grow between the constituent cells, and this \emph{correlation ergotropy}, being the energy that no local single-cell operation can reach and that only collective operations can recover, is the object of the present study. Following the charging trajectory of two coupled three-level cells, we find that the correlation ergotropy closely tracks the logarithmic negativity, which shows that the locked energy is carried by genuine bipartite entanglement rather than by coherent collective dynamics alone, and that an equal-strength coherent non-entangling drive produces no such locking at all. For a pure two-cell battery we establish an exact, basis-independent closed form in which the locked energy depends only on the sorted eigenvalues of the reduced cell and the cell energy levels, revealing that the locked fraction rises from zero at the separable corners of the Schmidt simplex to unity at the symmetric maximally entangled state and remains invariant under local unitaries. Decoherence and dephasing, which destroy the correlations, do \emph{not} release this energy but erase it, so extraction must be collective and must take place while the correlations persist, while cold damping leaves the effect intact and thermal occupation suppresses it. These results give a resource-theoretic reading of correlations in quantum batteries, sharpen the line between genuine entanglement and coherent collective dynamics, and point to experimentally accessible conditions for correlated-charge and collective-extraction protocols.
We investigate a two-qubit quantum battery where coherent charger-battery coupling competes with non-Markovian environmental interactions. By tuning the coupling strengths and detuning, we identify regimes in which environmental memory enhances energy storage and charging power, while strong dissipation suppresses ergotropy by driving the battery into passive states. We show that detuning plays a dual role: reducing dissipation and inducing a phase shift in the memory kernel that controls the interference between coherent energy exchange and environment-induced backflow. As a result, although the stored energy varies smoothly, the extractable work exhibits a discontinuous onset at a critical detuning, signaling a first-order phase transition in ergotropy. The corresponding phase diagram in the coupling-detuning plane reveals a sharp boundary between thermodynamically inactive and work-producing regimes. Our results demonstrate that phase-controlled coherence and non-Markovianity provide a powerful mechanism for optimizing work extraction in open quantum batteries, offering practical strategies for noise-resilient quantum energy storage.
Abstract Quantum batteries (QBs)—small-scale energy storage devices based on quantum systems—offer the potential for enhanced charging performance through quantum effects such as coherence and collectivity. In this work, we study the collective charging of QBs consisting of N qubits, coupled to a driven qubit charger in a star configuration, with controlled pure dephasing acting on the charger. We investigate how an ‘asymptotic freedom’-like behavior—in which all the energy deposited into the battery can be extracted as work, resulting in the ergotropy-to-energy ratio approaching unity—can emerge in the steady state of the battery. We show that the ergotropy-to-energy ratio increases with the number of qubits and approaches unity asymptotically as 1 − O ( 1 / N ) . In the large- N limit, the emergence of approximate ground-state degeneracy of the collective battery system leads to this asymptotic freedom behavior, despite the battery state remaining mixed. We also discuss the scaling behavior of the charging time of the battery with N .
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.
Ergotropic-gap relations provide thermodynamic witnesses of quantum correlations, but a direct dynamical connection between extractable work and entanglement remains largely unexplored in multipartite non-Gaussian bosonic systems. Here, we establish such a connection for a bosonic quantum battery driven by a coherent-state superposition. Despite the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, the dynamics retains a simple structure that allows the relevant work and correlation measures to be obtained exactly. We show that the loss of extractable work associated with the passive part of the battery energy is directly determined by charger-battery entanglement. This relation also separates the charging power into contributions from energy transfer and from changes in the battery spectrum. At the same time, multipartite correlations are progressively redistributed from charger-involving correlations to correlations internal to the battery. For a symmetric resonant protocol, complete energy transfer coincides with charger-battery disentanglement and fully extractable stored energy, while multipartite correlations within the battery are maximal. Individual cells, however, remain mixed, revealing a distinction between global and local work extraction. We further show that, in the regime considered, locally extractable work is entirely supported by energetic coherence. Under single-photon loss, the analytical structure survives, but environmental correlations separate charger disentanglement from maximal work extraction.