Collective-dissipation-controlled thermal rectification and entropy production in a three-terminal three-qubit XXZ spin chain

Abstract

We investigate thermal rectification and its thermodynamic cost in a three-qubit XXZ spin chain coupled to three thermal reservoirs: two local baths attached to the boundary qubits and a collective bath jointly coupled to the middle and right qubits. This asymmetric dissipative architecture allows the collective environment to actively reshape energy transport. We show that the heat current carried by the collective bath changes sign as its temperature is varied, and that the spin-chain anisotropy provides an effective internal control parameter for suppressing the boundary heat currents. These features yield thermal rectification coefficients of about $3.36\%$ at maximum bias and up to $20.1\%$ in the strongly anisotropic regime, although the latter comes at the cost of severely reduced heat currents. Beyond rectification, we evaluate the steady-state entropy production rate and identify a low-irreversibility operating window near the collective-current reversal, whereas increasing the local boundary couplings monotonically raises the thermodynamic cost. Our results establish collective dissipation as a tunable control mechanism for quantum heat transport and uncover a nontrivial trade-off among rectification, heat-current magnitude, and irreversible losses.