Extracting and charging energy into almost unknown quantum states (2509.08899v1)

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the amount of energy that can be extracted or charged through unitary operations when only minimal information about the state is known. Assuming knowledge of only the mean energy of the state, we start by developing optimal upper bounds for the work that can be unitarily extracted or charged in this scenario. In deriving these upper bounds, we provide a complete characterization of the minimum ergotropy and anti-ergotropy for density matrices with fixed average energy, showing that the minimum states are always passive or antipassive and the problem of finding them can be mapped to a simple linear programming algorithm. Furthermore, we show that these lower bounds directly translate into upper bounds for the energy-constrained coherent ergotropy and anti-ergotropy of a state. We continue by illustrating scenarios in which these bounds can be saturated: a simple unitary protocol is shown to saturate the bounds for relevant classes of Hamiltonians, while having access to decoherence or randomness as resources, the saturation is guaranteed for all Hamiltonians. Finally, by taking a qutrit as an example, we show and compare the performances of the various protocols identified.