Collective behavior, where a set of elements interact and generate effects that are beyond the reach of the individual noninteracting elements, is always of great interest in physics. Quantum collective effects that have no classical analog are even more intriguing. In this work, we show how to construct collective quantum heat machines and explore their performance boosts with respect to regular machines. Without interactions between the machines, the individual units operate in a stochastic, nonquantum manner. The construction of the collective machine becomes possible by introducing two simple quantum operations: coherence extraction and coherence injection. Together, these operations can harvest coherence from one engine and use it to boost the performance of a slightly different engine. For weakly driven engines, we show that the collective work output scales quadratically with the number of engines rather than linearly. Eventually, the boost saturates and then becomes linear. Nevertheless, even in saturation, work is still significantly boosted compared to individual operation. To study the reversibility of the collective machine, we introduce the “entropy-pollution” measure. It is shown that there is a regime where the collective machine is N times more reversible while producing N times more work, compared to the individual operation of N units. Moreover, the collective machine can even be more reversible than the most reversible unit in the collective. This high level of reversibility becomes possible due to a special symbiotic mechanism between engine pairs.
Various engine types are thermodynamically equivalent in the quantum limit of small “engine action”. Our previous derivation of the equivalence is restricted to Markovian heat baths and to implicit classical work repository (e.g., laser light in the semi-classical approximation). In this paper, all the components, baths, batteries, and engines, are explicitly taken into account. To neatly treat non-Markovian dynamics, we use mediating particles that function as a heat exchanger. We find that, on top of the previously observed equivalence, there is a higher degree of equivalence that cannot be achieved in the Markovian regime. Next, we focus on the quality of the battery charging process. A condition for positive energy increase and zero entropy increase (work) is given. Moreover, it is shown that, in the strong coupling regime, it is possible to super-charge a battery. With super-charging, the energy of the battery is increased while its entropy is being reduced at the same time.
One of the defining properties of an open quantum system is the variation of its purity in time. We derive speed limits on the rate of purity change for systems coupled to a Markovian environment. Our speed limits are based on Liouville space where density matrices are represented as vectors. This approach leads to speed limits that are always tighter compared to their parallel speed limits in Hilbert space. These bounds depend solely on the generators of the nonunitary dynamics and are independent of the particular state of the systems. Thus, they are perfectly suited to investigate dephasing, thermalization, and decorrelation processes of arbitrary states. We show that our speed limits can be attained and are therefore tight. As an application of our results we study dephasing of interacting spins, and the speed of classical and quantum correlation erasure in multi-particle system.