Optimized charging processes for quantum batteries

Abstract

Since its first formulations, in the beginning of the 20th century, the quantum theory has revolutionized different areas of the human knowledge and supports practically all the technologies present in the modern world. Medicine, chemistry, communications are only a few examples from various fields that received positive impacts arising from the ability to comprehend, predict and manipulate the microscopic world. By the end of the 20th century and start of the new millennium, the epoch's technological development made it possible to manipulate new concepts which were fundamental for the understanding of truly quantum phenomena. This way, terms like superposition and entanglement got the spotlights in the scientific world and the search for the development of new technologies that apply quantum effects intrinsic to the microscopic realm got impulsed. Development of more sensitive detectors, applications to communications networks and energy storage were some of the new targets during the so-called second quantum revolution, which extends up to the present days. In this thesis, we develop optimization methods for the charging of quantum batteries, which are microscopic systems fabricated with the goal of storing energy to be later used at some task of interest. We use the paradigm of quantum open systems, which is the description furnished to microscopic systems that suffer from deleterious effects from the environment in which they are inserted. Here, we develop some techniques to use quantum resources present in the system (as quantum coherence, for instance) to optimize the charging process of such batteries.