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

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Authors

Portugal, Pedro
Flindt, Christian
Lo Gullo, Nicola

Date

2021-11-12

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en

Pages

11

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Physical Review B, Volume 104, issue 20

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 nonequilibrium 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 nonlinear thermal components such as heat rectifiers and multipliers that operate with more than one diode.

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Funding Information: We thank M. Moskalets and D. Sánchez for useful discussions and acknowledge support from the Academy of Finland through the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Quantum Technology (Projects No. 312057 and No. 312299) and Projects No. 308515 and No. 318937. Numerical calculations were performed using the Finnish CSC facilities under the project “Thermoelectric Effects in Nanoscale Devices” (Project No. 2000962). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 American Physical Society.

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Portugal, P, Flindt, C & Lo Gullo, N 2021, ' Heat transport in a two-level system driven by a time-dependent temperature ', Physical Review B, vol. 104, no. 20, 205420 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.104.205420