Employing non-Markovian effects to improve the performance of a quantum Otto refrigerator

Abstract

The extension of quantum thermodynamics to situations that go beyond standard thermodynamic settings comprises an important and interesting aspect of its development. One such situation is the analysis of the thermodynamic consequences of structured environments that induce a non-Markovian dynamics. We study a quantum Otto refrigerator where the standard Markovian cold reservoir is replaced by a specific engineered cold reservoir which may induce a Markovian or non-Markovian dynamics on the quantum refrigerant system. The two dynamical regimes can be interchanged by varying the coupling between the refrigerant and the reservoir. An increase of non-Markovian effects will be related to an increase of the coupling strength, which in turn will make the energy stored in the interaction Hamiltonian, the interaction energy, increasingly relevant. We show how the figures of merit, the coefficient of performance and the cooling power, change for non-negligible interaction energies, discussing how neglecting this effect would lead to an overestimation of the refrigerator performance. Finally, we also consider a numerical simulation of a spin quantum refrigerator with experimentally feasible parameters to better illustrate the non-Markovian effects induced by the engineered cold reservoir. We argue that a moderate non-Markovian dynamics performs better than either a Markovian or a strong non-Markovian regime of operation.