Manipulation and enhancement of the performance of Otto cycle in the presence of nonthermal reservoirs

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In this work, we investigate the impact of energetic coherence in nonthermal reservoirs on the performance of the Otto cycle. We first focus on the situation where the working substance is a qubit. Due to the existence of coherence of nonthermal reservoir, various anomalous operating regimes such as the engine and refrigerator with efficiencies exceeding Carnot limits, as well as the hybrid refrigerator that can simultaneously achieve cooling and supplying work to an external agent, can occur. We demonstrate that the energetic coherence of the system’s steady state plays a significant role in determining the cycle’s functions by adding an additional stroke implementing dephasing and phase modulation operations in the cycle. The energetic coherence of the system is necessary to trigger the reservoir’s coherence to exert influences on the cycle. We decompose the thermodynamic quantities to the components arising from the populations and coherence of the system, and find that the reservoir’s coherence impacts the cycle from two aspects: one is the modification of the system’s steady-state populations or temperatures, and the other is the direct contributions to the heat in the interaction between the system and reservoirs. We then explore the scenario where the working substance is two identical qubits, and the reservoirs are common to them. We show that the degenerate coherence of the system in the steady state can enhance the performances of the cycle as different machines. Additionally, the energetic coherence of the reservoir modifies the functions of the cycle still through the energetic coherence of the system rather than their degenerate coherence.