The Unruh Quantum Otto Engine

Abstract

We introduce a quantum heat engine performing an Otto cycle by using the thermal properties of the quantum vacuum. Since Hawking and Unruh, it has been established that the vacuum space, either near a black hole or for an accelerated observer, behaves as a bath of thermal radiation. In this work, we present a fully quantum Otto cycle, which relies on the Unruh effect for a single quantum bit (qubit) in contact with quantum vacuum fluctuations. By using the notions of quantum thermodynamics and perturbation theory we obtain that the quantum vacuum can exchange heat and produce work on the qubit. Moreover, we obtain the efficiency and derive the conditions to have both a thermodynamic and a kinematic cycle in terms of the initial populations of the excited state, which define a range of allowed accelerations for the Unruh engine.

31 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• The Physics of Maxwell's demon and information
• The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivable from quantum heat engines
• Quantum engine efficiency bound beyond the second law of thermodynamics
• Proposal for observing the Unruh effect with classical electrodynamics

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• Quantum Otto engine driven by quantum fields
• An exactly solvable relativistic quantum Otto engine
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• Accelerated paths and Unruh effect I: scalars and fermions in Anti De Sitter spacetime
• Accelerated paths and Unruh effect II: finite time detector response in (Anti) de Sitter spacetime and Huygen's Principle
• Quantum thermal machines in BTZ black hole spacetime
• Relativistic quantum Otto heat engine using a three-level Unruh-DeWitt detector
• Energy change and Landauer's principle in the interaction between qubit and quantum field theory
• Relative entropy formulation of thermalization process in a Schwarzschild spacetime
• Thermodynamic uncertainty relations for relativistic quantum thermal machines
• Quantum regression theorem in the Unruh-DeWitt battery