Towards minimal conditions for ergotropy injection in open quantum systems
Interactions between a quantum system and its environment can inject ergotropy into the system, raising the question of the minimal dimensionality and physical resources required for such injection. We first show that ergotropy injection is impossible under thermal operations when both the system and environment are qubits, whereas it becomes possible when the environment is enlarged to a qutrit. We further show that already in the qubit-qubit setting, relaxing environmental thermality and allowing interactions between system and environment allows ergotropy increment under energy-conserving unitaries. To elucidate the role of interactions, we consider a two-qubit isotropic XY interaction Hamiltonian and identify its distinct degeneracy regimes. We show that, in the central-block regime, when both the initial system and environmental states are incoherent, no ergotropic gain is possible when the environment is initially thermal, irrespective of the interaction strength. In contrast, environmental athermality in the form of population inversion, while retaining incoherence, enables ergotropic injection. We derive the optimal ergotropic gain and show that environmental coherence can enhance it, while system coherence alone need not be beneficial and can even reduce the gain. We further consider the double-degenerate regime, characterized by a finite interaction strength, and demonstrate positive ergotropic gain even for a thermal environment.