Nonequilibrium Many-Body Quantum Engine Driven by Time-Translation Symmetry Breaking

Carollo, Federico; Brandner, Kay; Lesanovsky, Igor

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.240602

Cited by 20 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Despite these profound insights on their emergent dynamics, much less is known about thermodynamic properties of time-crystalline phases (see related issues for nonequilibrium engines [27][28][29]). Understanding and controlling heat currents, power exchanges and irreversible entropy production in these systems is, however, both of fundamental interest and of practical relevance, for instance for exploring efficiency measures and thermodynamic costs of possible applications of time-crystals as resources for quantum sensing [30][31][32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum thermodynamics of boundary time-crystals

Carollo,

Lesanovsky,

Antezza

et al. 2024

Quantum Sci. Technol.

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Time-translation symmetry breaking is a mechanism for the emergence of non-stationary many-body phases, so-called time-crystals, in Markovian open quantum systems. Dynamical aspects of time-crystals have been extensively explored over the recent years. However, much less is known about their thermodynamic properties, also due to the intrinsic nonequilibrium nature of these phases. Here, we consider the paradigmatic boundary time-crystal system, in a finite-temperature environment, and demonstrate the persistence of the time-crystalline phase at any temperature. Furthermore, we analyze thermodynamic aspects of the model investigating, in particular, heat currents, power exchange and irreversible entropy production.  Our work sheds light on the thermodynamic cost of sustaining nonequilibrium time-crystalline phases and provides a framework for characterizing time-crystals as possible resources for, e.g., quantum sensing. Our results may be verified in experiments, for example with trapped ions or superconducting circuits, since we connect thermodynamic quantities with mean value and covariance of collective (magnetization) operators.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum thermodynamics of boundary time-crystals

Carollo,

Lesanovsky,

Antezza

et al. 2024

Quantum Sci. Technol.

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“…A promising avenue towards scaling up the power and constancy of quantum thermal machines is to replace working systems with few degrees of freedom by many-body systems capable of hosting collective effects, which may lead to uncovering new mechanisms of energy conversion . Such effects, whose thermodynamics is yet to be fully understood, include: tunable interactions between particles, which can be used for work-extraction [44][45][46]; super-radiance and broken time-translation symmetry, which emerge in multi-level systems coupled to a thermal bath via collective observables [47][48][49][50][51][52]; quantum phase transitions [53][54][55][56] or quantum statistics, which provides a means of controlling an effective pressure that has no classical counterpart [57][58][59][60][61]. Thermodynamic geometry offers a powerful tool to analyse these phenomena from a unifying perspective and thus a potential avenue towards a universal framework describing how many-body effects can alter the performance of quantum thermal machines.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermodynamic geometry of ideal quantum gases: a general framework and a geometric picture of BEC-enhanced heat engines

et al. 2023

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Thermodynamic geometry provides a physically transparent framework to describe thermodynamic processes in meso- and micro-scale systems that are driven by slow variations of external control parameters. Focusing on periodic driving for thermal machines, we extend this framework to ideal quantum gases. To this end, we show that the standard approach of equilibrium physics, where a grand-canonical ensemble is used to model a canonical one by fixing the mean particle number through the chemical potential, can be extended to the slow driving regime in a thermodynamically consistent way. As a key application of our theory, we use a Lindblad-type quantum master equation to work out a dynamical model of a quantum many-body engine using a harmonically trapped Bose-gas. Our results provide a geometric picture of the BEC-induced power enhancement that was previously predicted for this type of engine on the basis of an endoreversible model [New J. Phys. 24, 025001 (2022)]. Using an earlier derived universal trade-off relation between power and efficiency as a benchmark, we further show that the Bose-gas engine can deliver significantly more power at given efficiency than an equally large collection of single-body engines. Our work paves the way for a more general thermodynamic framework that makes it possible to systematically assess the impact of quantum many-body effects on the performance of thermal machines.

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“…There are two recently introduced concepts, dissipative time crystals [27,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58], which are systems that have persistent oscillations induced by the dissipation, and boundary time crystals [59][60][61][62][63], which have persistent oscillations in the thermodynamic limit only (cf. discrete, driven versions of time crystals under dissipation [64][65][66][67][68][69][70] and other non-stationary phenomena beyond ob-servables e.g. [71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exact bistability and time pseudo-crystallization of driven-dissipative fermionic lattices

Alaeian¹,

Buča²

2022

Preprint

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The existence of bistability in quantum optical systems remains a intensely debated open question beyond the mean-field approximation. Quantum fluctuations are finite-size corrections to the mean-field approximation used because the full exact solution is unobtainable. Usually, quantum fluctuations destroy the bistability present on the mean-field level. Here, by identifying and using exact modulated semi-local dynamical symmetries in a certain quantum optical models of drivendissipative fermionic chains we exactly prove bistability in precisely the quantum fluctuations. Surprisingly, rather than destroying bistability, the quantum fluctuations themselves exhibit bistability, even though it is absent on the mean-field level for our systems. Moreover, the models studied acquire additional thermodynamic dynamical symmetries that imply persistent periodic oscillations in the quantum fluctuations, constituting pseudo-variants of boundary time crystals. Physically, these emergent operators correspond to finite-frequency and finite-momentum semi-local Goldstone modes. Our work therefore provides to the best of our knowledge the first example of a provably bistable quantum optical system.

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Nonequilibrium Many-Body Quantum Engine Driven by Time-Translation Symmetry Breaking

Cited by 20 publications

References 51 publications

Quantum thermodynamics of boundary time-crystals

Quantum thermodynamics of boundary time-crystals

Thermodynamic geometry of ideal quantum gases: a general framework and a geometric picture of BEC-enhanced heat engines

Exact bistability and time pseudo-crystallization of driven-dissipative fermionic lattices

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