Cooperative efficiency boost for quantum heat engines

Abstract

The power and efficiency of many-body heat engines can be boosted by performing cooperative non-adiabatic operations in contrast to the commonly used adiabatic implementations. Here, the key property relies on the fact that non-adiabaticity is required in order to allow for cooperative effects, that can use the thermodynamic resources only present in the collective non-passive state of a many-body system. In particular, we consider the efficiency of an Otto cycle, which increases with the number of copies used and reaches a many-body bound, which we discuss analytically.