Interaction-enabled charging and thermal crossover of the spin-work deficit in a Hubbard double quantum dot
We study how conservation of total spin affects the extractable work of an interacting Hubbard double quantum dot charged in the presence of unresolved quasistatic detuning fluctuations. The full fermionic Fock space is used to model preparation through electronic reservoirs, whereas the additional work deficit associated with spin conservation arises entirely from the singlet and triplet states at half filling. At zero detuning, modulation of the symmetric tunnel barrier couples two singlets of even parity. The corresponding transition matrix element vanishes when U = V . An exact formula for the additional work deficit follows from passive spectral rearrangement under two extraction constraints: conservation of particle number alone and conservation of both particle number and total spin. At low temperature, an expansion in the detuning response gives a leading estimate of the noise amplitude at which this deficit first appears. Increasing the preparation temperature changes the triplet population and produces a crossover at s2 = q, where the additional spin constraint becomes nonbinding for the averaged state, even though both ergotropies may continue to decrease. We obtain a semi-analytic expression for this crossover by separating the thermal Gibbs weights from the singlet dynamics under a fixed charging pulse. Averaging over symmetric detuning disorder also restores parity in the density matrix and allows singlet eigenvalues of different parity to exchange order, changing the branch that determines the thermal boundary. The work values are optimal over specified classes of unitary operations and do not establish the yield of a finite discharge protocol.