Abstract
Quantum thermal transistor is a microscopic thermodynamical device that can modulate and amplify heat current through two terminals by the weak heat current at the third terminal. Here we study the common environmental effects on a quantum thermal transistor made up of three strong-coupling qubits. It is shown that the functions of the thermal transistor can be maintained and the amplification rate can be modestly enhanced by the skillfully designed common environments. In particular, the presence of a dark state in the case of the completely correlated transitions can provide an additional external channel to control the heat currents without any disturbance of the amplification rate. These results show that common environmental effects can offer new insights into improving the performance of quantum thermal devices.
Highlights
Quantum thermodynamics, which incorporates classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, has attracted wide attention [1,2,3]
We show that the system can still work as a thermal transisor and the common environments influence the three heat currents of the thermal transistor to different degrees, so the amplification effect proportional to the ratio of thermal currents can be enhanced by appropriately designing the common coupling strengths
We have studied the common environmental effects on the quantum thermal transistor
Summary
Quantum thermodynamics, which incorporates classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, has attracted wide attention [1,2,3]. The self-contained thermal devices were originally proposed as refrigerators to cool the cold bath [12,13,14,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45], or as thermal engines to extract work [46,47] Later, they were widely extended to a variety of cases, including the different interaction mechanisms, or for achieving various functions, such as heat current amplification [9,24,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55], thermal rectification [19,20,21,54,55,56,57,58,59,60], thermal batteries [61,62,63], and thermometers [64,65,66].
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