Newman David, Mintert Florian, Nazir Ahsan
Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Photon Science Institute and School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom.
Phys Rev E. 2017 Mar;95(3-1):032139. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.032139. Epub 2017 Mar 27.
We study a quantum heat engine at strong coupling between the system and the thermal reservoirs. Exploiting a collective coordinate mapping, we incorporate system-reservoir correlations into a consistent thermodynamic analysis, thus circumventing the usual restriction to weak coupling and vanishing correlations. We apply our formalism to the example of a quantum Otto cycle, demonstrating that the performance of the engine is diminished in the strong coupling regime with respect to its weakly coupled counterpart, producing a reduced net work output and operating at a lower energy conversion efficiency. We identify costs imposed by sudden decoupling of the system and reservoirs around the cycle as being primarily responsible for the diminished performance, and we define an alternative operational procedure which can partially recover the work output and efficiency. More generally, the collective coordinate mapping holds considerable promise for wider studies of thermodynamic systems beyond weak reservoir coupling.
我们研究了一个系统与热库之间强耦合的量子热机。通过利用集体坐标映射，我们将系统 - 热库关联纳入到一致的热力学分析中，从而规避了通常对弱耦合和零关联的限制。我们将我们的形式体系应用于量子奥托循环的示例，证明在强耦合 regime 中，该发动机的性能相对于其弱耦合对应物有所降低，产生的净功输出减少且能量转换效率较低。我们确定循环周围系统与热库突然解耦所带来的成本是性能下降的主要原因，并且我们定义了一种替代操作程序，该程序可以部分恢复功输出和效率。更一般地说，集体坐标映射对于超出弱热库耦合的热力学系统的更广泛研究具有很大的前景。
