Three cooling off in two baths: Beyond two-body system-bath interactions in quantum refrigerators


Abstract in English

We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which has traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of the qubits, including the qubit to be cooled, are connected to a common bath. With a careful choice of the system, bath, and qubit-bath interaction parameters within the Born-Markov and rotating wave approximations, one of the qubits attached to the common bath achieves a cooling in the steady-state. We observe that the proposed refrigerator may also operate in a parameter regime where no or negligible steady-state cooling is achieved, but there is considerable transient cooling. The steady-state temperature can be lowered significantly by an increase in the strength of the few-body interaction terms existing due to the use of the common bath in the refrigerator setup, proving the importance of the two-bath setup over the conventional three-bath construction. The proposed refrigerator built with three qubits and two baths is shown to provide steady-state cooling for both Markovian qubit-bath interactions between the qubits and canonical bosonic thermal reservoirs, and a simpler reset model for the qubit-bath interactions.

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