Optimal refrigerator

Abstract

We study a refrigerator model which consists of two $n$-level systems interacting via a pulsed external field. Each system couples to its own thermal bath at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively ($\theta\equiv T_c/T_h<1$). The refrigerator functions in two steps: thermally isolated interaction between the systems driven by the external field and isothermal relaxation back to equilibrium. There is a complementarity between the power of heat transfer from the cold bath and the efficiency: the latter nullifies when the former is maximized and {\it vice versa}. A reasonable compromise is achieved by optimizing the product of the heat-power and efficiency over the Hamiltonian of the two system. The efficiency is then found to be bounded from below by $\zeta_{\rm CA}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\theta}}-1$ (an analogue of the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency), besides being bound from above by the Carnot efficiency $\zeta_{\rm C} = \frac{1}{1-\theta}-1$. The lower bound is reached in the equilibrium limit $\theta\to 1$. The Carnot bound is reached (for a finite power and a finite amount of heat transferred per cycle) for $\ln n\gg 1$. If the above maximization is constrained by assuming homogeneous energy spectra for both systems, the efficiency is bounded from above by $\zeta_{\rm CA}$ and converges to it for $n\gg 1$.