Heat transport in a two-level system driven by a time-dependent temperature

Abstract

The field of thermotronics aims to develop thermal circuits that operate with temperature biases and heat currents just as how electronic circuits are based on voltages and electric currents. Here, we investigate a thermal half-wave rectifier based on a quantum two-level system (a qubit) that is driven by a periodically modulated temperature difference across it. To this end, we present a non-equilibrium Green's function technique, which we extend to the time domain to account for the time-dependent temperature in one of two thermal reservoirs connected to the qubit. We find that the qubit acts a thermal diode in parallel with a thermal capacitor, whose capacitance is controlled by the coupling to the reservoirs. These findings are important for the efforts to design non-linear thermal components such as heat rectifiers and multipliers that operate with more than one diode.

12 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Heat Transport in low-dimensional systems
• Thermal Logic Gates: Computation with phonons
• Radiative bistability and thermal memory
• Quantum Thermodynamics: A Nonequilibrium Green's Functions Approach
• Thermal rectification in nonlinear quantum circuits
• Mesoscopic photon heat transistor
• Thermal vector potential theory of transport induced by temperature gradient
• Functional Integral approach to time-dependent heat exchange in open quantum systems: general method and applications
• Periodic energy transport and entropy production in quantum electronics
• Luttinger-field approach to thermoelectric transport in nanoscale conductors
• Meir-Wingreen formula for heat transport in a spin-boson nanojunction model
• Thermotronics: toward nanocircuits to manage radiative heat flux
• Unifying quantum heat transfer in a nonequilibrium spin-boson model with full counting statistics