Josephson Quantum Heat Engine

Abstract

The design of a mesoscopic self-oscillating heat engine that works thanks to purely quantum effects is presented. The proposed scheme is amenable to experimental implementation with current state-of-the-art nanotechnology and materials. One of the main features of the structure is its versatility: The engine can deliver work to a generic load without galvanic contact. This makes it a promising building block for low-temperature on-chip energy management applications. The heat engine consists of a circuit featuring a thermoelectric element based on a ferromagnetic insulator-superconductor tunnel junction and a Josephson weak link that realizes a purely quantum DC/AC converter. This enables contactless transfer of work to the load (a generic RL circuit). The performance of the heat engine is investigated as a function of the thermal gradient applied to the thermoelectric junction. Power up to $1$ pW can be delivered to a load $R_L=10\Omega$.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The Josephson heat interferometer
• Nonequilibrium fluctuations in quantum heat engines: Theory, example, and possible solid state experiments
• Superconductors as ideal spin sources for spintronics
• Information entropic superconducting microcooler
• Proposal for a phase-coherent thermoelectric transistor
• Phase-controlled superconducting heat-flux quantum modulator
• Heat transport and electron cooling in ballistic normal-metal/spin-filter/superconductor junctions

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Quantum thermodynamic devices: from theoretical proposals to experimental reality
• Autonomous Quantum Refrigerator in a Circuit-QED Architecture Based on a Josephson Junction
• Quantum Engines and Refrigerators
• Josephson-Threshold Calorimeter
• Nonlocal quantum heat engines made of hybrid superconducting devices
• Stochastic thermodynamics of self-oscillations: the electron shuttle
• Two-Stroke Optimization Scheme for Mesoscopic Refrigerators
• Superconductor-ferromagnet hybrids for non-reciprocal electronics and detectors
• Performance boost of a collective qutrit refrigerator
• Highly efficient phase-tunable photonic thermal diode
• Quantum heat diode versus light emission in circuit quantum electrodynamical system
• Phase and Thermal Driven Transport across T-Shaped Double Quantum Dot Josephson Junction
• Phase-dependent transport in thermally-driven superconducting single-electron transistors
• Thermodynamics of a phase-driven proximity Josephson junction
• Josephson quantum spin thermodynamics
• Giant Thermoelectric Response of Fluxons in Superconductors
• Bipolar thermoelectric superconducting single-electron transistor
• Spin-chain based quantum thermal machines
• Finite-time performance of a cyclic 2d quantum Ising heat engine
• Quantum thermal diode with additional control by auxiliary atomic states
• Quantum circuit refrigerator based on quantum dots coupled to normal-metal and superconducting electrodes