Cooperative Efficiency Boost For Quantum Heat Engines

The power and efficiency of many-body heat engines can be boosted by performing cooperative nonadiabatic operations in contrast to the commonly used adiabatic implementations. Here the key property relies on the fact that nonadiabaticity is required in order to allow for cooperative effects that can use the thermodynamic resources only present in the collective nonpassive state of a many-body system. In particular, we consider the efficiency of an Otto cycle, which increases with the number of copies used and reaches a many-body bound, which we discuss analytically.