Dynamics of a strongly coupled quantum heat engine—Computing bath observables from the hierarchy of pure states
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present a fully quantum dynamical treatment of a quantum heat engine and its baths based on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), an exact and general method for open quantum system dynamics. We show how the change of the bath energy and the interaction energy can be determined within HOPS for arbitrary coupling strength and smooth time dependence of the modulation protocol. The dynamics of all energetic contributions during the operation can be carefully examined both in its initial transient phase and, also later, in its periodic steady state. A quantum Otto engine with a qubit as an inherently nonlinear work medium is studied in a regime where the energy associated with the interaction Hamiltonian plays an important role for the global energy balance and, thus, must not be neglected when calculating its power and efficiency. We confirm that the work required to drive the coupling with the baths sensitively depends on the speed of the modulation protocol. Remarkably, departing from the conventional scheme of well-separated phases by allowing for temporal overlap, we discover that one can even gain energy from the modulation of bath interactions. We visualize these various work contributions using the analog of state change diagrams of thermodynamic cycles. We offer a concise, full presentation of HOPS with its extension to bath observables, as it serves as a universal tool for the numerically exact description of general quantum dynamical (thermodynamic) scenarios far from the weak-coupling limit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".