Collectively enhanced high-power and high-capacity charging of quantum batteries via quantum heat engines (2008.07089v2)

Abstract: As a model of so-called quantum battery (QB), quantum degrees of freedom as energy storage, we study a charging protocol of a many-body QB consisting of $N$ two-level systems (TLSs) using quantum heat engines (QHEs). We focus on the collective enhancement effects in the charging performance of QBs in comparison to the individual charging. It is a challenging goal of QBs to achieve large collective enhancements in the charging power and the capacity while keeping the experimental feasibility, the stability, and the cheapness of the required control and resources. We show that our model actually exhibits these features. In fact, our protocol simultaneously achieves the asymptotically-perfect charge and almost $N$-order average power enhancement with only thermal energy resource and simple local interactions in a stable manner. The capacity is collectively enhanced due to the emergent bosonic quantum statistics caused by the symmetry of the interaction between the engine and the batteries, which results in asymptotically perfect excitation of all the TLSs. The charging speed, and hence the average power are collectively enhanced by the superradiance-like cooperative excitation in the effective negative temperature. Our results suggest that QHEs actually fit for a charger of QBs, efficiently exploiting the collective enhancements, not only converting the disordered thermal energy to the ordered energy stored in quantum degrees of freedom.