Geometric Heat Pump: Controlling Thermal Transport with Time-dependent Modulations

Abstract

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat simultaneously flows from the hot to cold bath on average. To go beyond this picture, a range of works in the past decade show that, other than the average dynamical heat flux determined by instantaneous thermal bias, a non-trivial flux contribution of intrinsic geometric origin is generally present in temporally driven systems. This additional heat flux provides a free lunch for the pumped heat and could even drive heat against the bias. We review here the emergence and development of this so called ``geometric heat pump'', originating from the topological geometric phase effect, and cover various quantum and classical transport systems with different internal dynamics. The generalization from the adiabatic to the non-adiabatic regime and the application of control theory are also discussed. Then, we briefly discuss the symmetry restriction on the heat pump effect, such as duality, supersymmetry and time-reversal symmetry. Finally, we examine open problems concerning the geometric heat pump process and elucidate their prospective significance in devising thermal machines with high performance.