We investigate nonequilibrium energy transfer in a single-site Bose-Hubbard model coupled to two thermal baths. By including a quantum kinetic equation combined with full counting statistics, we investigate the steady state energy flux and noise power. The influence of the nonlinear Bose-Hubbard interaction on the transfer behaviors is analyzed, and the nonmonotonic features are clearly exhibited. Particularly, in the strong on-site repulsion limit, the results become identical with the nonequilibrium spin-boson model. We also extend the quantum kinetic equation to study the geometric-phase-induced energy pump. An interesting reversal behavior is unraveled by enhancing the Bose-Hubbard repulsion strength. Geometric-phase induced energy pump
IntroductionFar-from-equilibrium transport, out of linear-response and quasi-equilibrium regimes, has been attracting much attention, ranging from molecular electronics, quantum magnets to strongly-correlated materials [1][2][3][4][5], which is of great importance both for fundamental research and practical application. According to the second law of thermodynamics, energy will flow naturally from the hot source to the cold drain, under the thermodynamic bias. Thus, how to control energy transfer in low-dimensional quantum systems becomes a crucial issue, to unravel the nonequilibrium mechanism and improve the design of efficient devices [6].Many proposals have been carried out to study nonequilibrium transport in fermionic systems [7]. Various interesting phenomena have been unraveled mainly due to the interplay between the voltage and the temperature bias. In particular, the photovoltaic effect, driven by the nonequilibrium light-electron interaction, provides an efficient way to convert the sunlight to electricity for useful performance [8]. And the influence of quantum coherence on improving the photovoltaic efficiency was recently proposed [9][10][11]. While the thermoelectric effect, one typical kind of heat transfer, describes direct conversion of the thermal bias to electric voltage [7,12]. The relationship between the thermoelectric figure of merit and the conversion efficiency has been quantitatively characterized [13,14]. Moreover, the Kondo effect, an anomalous feature of the conductance in low temperature regime, describes the scattering of the conduction electrons mediated by a magnetic impurity [15,16]. However, as an intimate analogy, the corresponding bosonic systems are lack of exploitation.Recently, due to fast development of photonics and phononics in quantum transport, the bosonic systems gain significant popularity [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. As a prototype, the nonequilibrium single-site Bose-Hubbard (SSBH) model is introduced to describe the bosonic system-reservoir interaction [27,28]. The nonlinear Bose-Hubbard coupling is found to be crucial to exhibit novel steady state behaviors. Such an interaction can be realized by Kerr interaction in quantum optics [29], by tuning the qubit to the dispersive regime in circuit quantum electrodynami...