Europhysics News 53-4

IN THE SPOTLIGHTS
Highlight from EPL
Superadiabatic Quantum Batteries
Recent advances in quantum thermodynamics and control theory have broadened the
horizon ahead of us, leading to the development of new quantum technologies. In this
context, a remarkable quantum device allows us to exploit the properties of quantum
systems to efficiently store energy.
This device is known as a
quantum battery (QB).
QBs are expected to
provide energy to realize
work. The maximum energy that
can be extractable as work from a
quantum system via unitary operations
is called ergotropy. The search
for reliable and efficient sources of
ergotropy has motivated the community
to look at a diversity of physical
systems. Although QBs are a
quantum analog to conventional
(classical) batteries, it is evident the
discrepancy between the features of
classical and quantum batteries. In
particular, the charging stability is a
characteristic that needs to be perfectly
controlled for QBs, what can
be achieved through a suitable adiabatic
approach. Adiabaticity is a convenient
tool in quantum control to
drive the system to a target state, but
it may require long evolution times.
Our work provides a route to achieve
such a controllability in high-speed
charging QBs through shortcuts to
adiabaticity (STA).
By using a system composed of
a pair of entangled quantum bits
(qubits) working as a QB and an auxiliary
qubit working as a consumption
hub, we first proposed the use of
both entangled Bell states and adiabatic
dynamics to provide a novel kind
of stable and power switchable QBs.
However, due to fundamental limitations
of the evolution speed imposed
by the validity conditions to adiabaticity,
the performance of such a device
would be, in principle, drastically
affected by undesired interactions between
the battery and its surrounding
environment. In adiabatic QBs, the
charging power is constrained by the
m Top: Sketch of the initial and final state of the QB-consumption
hub (or charger-QB) system, where adiabatic and superadiabatic
strategies can be used to a same purpose (energy transfer).
Bottom: Representative graphs showing the expected advantage
of superadiabatic QB concerning its adiabatic counterpart.
total evolution time τ ch required to
adiabatically drive the system from
an empty battery state to a fully
charged one. If we take into account
decoherence processes, a second time
scale τ coh , associated to the coherence
time of the system, needs to be considered
and the condition τ ch