Thermodynamics from indistinguishability: mitigating and amplifying the effects of the bath

Abstract

Rich quantum effects emerge when several quantum systems are indistinguishable from the point of view of the bath they interact with. In particular, delocalised excitations corresponding to coherent superposition of excited states appear and change drastically the dynamics and steady state of the systems. Such phenomena, which are central mechanisms of superradiance, present interesting properties for thermodynamics and potentially other quantum technologies. Indeed, a recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 99, 052105 (2019)] studies these properties in a pair of indistinguishable two-level systems and points out surprising effects of mitigation and amplification of the bath's action on the energy and entropy of the pair. Here, we generalise the study to ensembles of arbitrary number of spins of arbitrary size (i.e. dimension). We confirm that the previously uncovered mitigation and amplification effects remain, but also that they become more and more pronounced with growing number of spins and growing spin size. Moreover, we find that the free energy variation and the entropy production associated with the bath-driven dissipation are systematically reduced, formalising the idea of mitigation of the bath's action. Most remarkably, the combination of mitigation effects from two baths at different temperatures can result in amplifying their action. This is illustrated with cyclic thermal machines, and leads to large power enhancements. The reduction of irreversibility is also an interesting aspect since irreversibility is known to limit the performance of thermodynamic tasks. The above findings might also lead to interesting applications in collective work extraction, quantum battery charging, state protection, light harvesting devices, quantum biology, but also for the study of entropy production. Moreover, some experimental realisations and observations suggest that such effects are within reach.