Unruh Quantum Otto heat engine with level degeneracy

Abstract

We investigate the Unruh quantum Otto heat engine with level degeneracy. An effectively two level system, where the ground state is non-degenerate and the excited state is $n$-fold degenerate, is acting as the working substance, and the vacuum of massless free scalar field serves as a thermal bath via the Unruh effect. We calculate the heat and work at each step of the Unruh quantum Otto cycle and study the features of the heat engine. The efficiency of the heat engine depends only on the excited energy values of the two level system, not on its level degeneracy. However, the degeneracy acts as a kind of thermodynamic resource and helps us to extract more work than in the non-degenerate case. The extractable work has a finite upper bound, corresponding to $n\to \infty$.

5 figures;v2: references and more discussion added, accepted by PLB

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• Unruh quantum Otto engine in the presence of a reflecting boundary
• Quantum Otto engine driven by quantum fields
• An exactly solvable relativistic quantum Otto engine
• Relativistic quantum Otto engine: Instant work extraction from a quantum field
• 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
• Thermodynamic uncertainty relations for relativistic quantum thermal machines