Beyond Qubits: Building Quantum Refrigerators in Higher Dimensions

Abstract

We design quantum refrigerators based on spin-j quantum XYZ and bilinear-biquadratic models with individual spins attached to bosonic thermal baths. By considering both local and global master equations, we illustrate an enhancement in the performance of the refrigerators with an increase in the spin dimension irrespective of the choice of the spin models. To assess the performance of the refrigerators, we introduce a distance-based measure to quantify the local temperature of a particle with arbitrary spin quantum number j. Interestingly, we find that the local temperature quantifier, defined via minimizing the distance between a spin-j thermal state and the evolved state of the spin-j particle in the steady state, coincides with the population-based definition of local temperature known in the literature for spin-1/2 particles. Moreover, we demonstrate that the qualitative behavior of the distance-based local temperature is independent of the choice of the distance measure by comparing the trace distance, Uhlmann's fidelity and relative entropy distance. We further observe by computing local master equation that the quantum refrigerator consisting of a spin-1/2 and a spin-j particle can lead to a lower local temperature compared to a refrigerator with two identical spin-j particles following the XYZ interactions.