Dephasing-enhanced performance in quasiperiodic thermal machines

Abstract

Understanding and controlling quantum transport in low-dimensional systems is pivotal for heat management at the nanoscale. One promising strategy to obtain the desired transport properties is to engineer particular spectral structures. In this work we are interested in quasiperiodic disorder - incommensurate with the underlying periodicity of the lattice - which induces fractality in the energy spectrum. A well known example is the Fibonacci model which, despite being non-interacting, yields anomalous diffusion with a continuously varying dynamical exponent smoothly crossing over from superdiffusive to subdiffusive regime as a function of potential strength. We study the finite-temperature electric and heat transport of this model in linear response in the absence and in the presence of dephasing noise due to inelastic scattering. The dephasing causes both thermal and electric transport to become diffusive, thereby making thermal and electrical conductivities finite in the thermodynamic limit. Thus, in the subdiffusive regime it leads to enhancement of transport. We find that the thermal and electric conductivities have multiple peaks as a function of dephasing strength. Remarkably, we observe that the thermal and electrical conductivities are not proportional to each other, a clear violation of Wiedemann-Franz law, and the position of their maxima can differ. We argue that this feature can be utilized to enhance performance of quantum thermal machines. In particular, we show that by tuning the strength of the dephasing noise we can enhance the performance of the device in regimes where it acts as an autonomous refrigerator.