Seminar: Archak Purkayastha, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus

In this talk, I will introduce the Periodically Refreshed Baths (PReB) scheme. Simulating non-Markovian dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems strongly coupled to multiple baths at different temperatures and chemical potentials is a challenging and experimentally relevant problem. The PReB scheme allows for efficient tensor network based numerical simulation of such situations much beyond what is possible in most other techniques. Going further, one can extend the PReB scheme beyond just a numerical technique, to a dynamical process that can be potentially realized in experiments. We then explore the thermodynamics of the steady state of the PReB process. This leads to novel Periodically Refreshed Quantum Thermal Machines, which can interpolate between autonomous quantum thermal machines and those based on collisional or repeated interactions with single-site environments. These quantum thermal machines work on a single-stroke thermodynamic cycle where the working material is always out-of-equilibrium. They can have many counter-intuitive properties, which I will demonstrate via a simple example.

 Refs: Phys. Rev. B 104, 045417 (2021),  Quantum 6, 801 (2022).