miércoles, 21 de junio de 2017

Quantum effects lead to more powerful battery charging

The researchers, Francesco Campaioli et al., have published a paper on the fast charging of nanoscale batteries in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

Although a great deal of research has shown that quantum phenomena provide advantages in information processing applications, such as computing and secure communication, there have been very few demonstrations of quantum advantages in thermodynamics. In one recent study in this area, researchers showed that quantum entanglement can allow more work to be extracted from a nanoscale energy-storage device, or "quantum battery," than would be possible without entanglement. 

In the new study, the researchers build on this result to show that quantum phenomena can also enhance the charging power of quantum batteries. They also found that the process does not necessarily require entanglement, although it does require operations that have the potential to generate entangled states.

"Our work shows how entangling operationsóthat is, interactions between two or more bodiesóare necessary to obtain a quantum advantage for the charging power of many-body batteries, whereas entanglement itself does not constitute a resource," Campaioli, at Monash University in Australia, told Phys.org. "Additionally, we show that for locally coupled batteries the quantum advantage scales with the number of interacting batteries."

The quantum advantage is not without its limits, however, and the physicists derive the upper bound on how much faster a collection of batteries can be charged with the help of quantum phenomena. They show that for locally coupled batteries the quantum advantage grows with the number of interacting batteries. These bounds for the quantum advantage are based on quantum speed limits, which are used, for example, to estimate the maximum speed of quantum processes, such as calculations on a quantum computer. Here, the limit is for thermodynamic processes. 

Overall, the results may lead to methods of improving future nanoscale energy-charging processes, as well as to a better understanding of how quantum theory and thermodynamics are related.

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