Geometric phaselike effects in a quantum heat engine

Abstract

By periodically driving the temperatures of reservoirs in quantum heat engines, geometric phase or Pancharatnam-Berry phase-like (PBp) effects in the thermodynamics can be observed. The PBp can be identified from a generating function (GF) method within an adiabatic quantum Markovian master equation formalism. The GF is shown not to lead to a standard open quantum system's fluctuation theorem in presence of phase-different modulations with an inapplicability in the use of the popular large deviation theory. Effect of coherences on the optimized value of the flux is nullified due to PBp contributions. The PBp causes the universality of the linear coefficient in the expansion of the efficiency at maximum power in terms of Carnot efficiency to be violated.