High-capacity and high-power collective charging with spin chargers

Quantum battery works as a micro- or nanodevice to store and redistribute energy at the quantum level. Here we propose a spin-charger protocol, in which the battery cells are charged by a finite number of spins through a general Heisenberg XY interaction. Under the isotropic interaction, the spin-charger protocol is endowed with a higher capacity in terms of the maximum stored energy than the conventional protocols, where the battery is charged by a continuous-variable system, e.g., a cavity mode. By tuning the charger size, a tradeoff between the maximum stored energy and the average charging power is found in comparison to the cavity-charger protocol in the Tavis-Cummings model. Quantum advantage of our protocol is manifested by the scaling behavior of the optimal average power with respect to the battery size, in comparing the collective charging scheme to its parallel counterpart. We also discuss the detrimental effect on the charging performance from the anisotropic interaction between the battery and the charger, the nonideal initial states for both of them, and the crosstalk among the charger spins. A strong charger-charger interaction can be used to decouple the battery and the charger. Our findings about the advantages of the spin-charger protocol over the conventional cavity-charger protocols, including the high capacity of energy storage and the superior power law in the collective charging, provide an insight to exploit an efficient quantum battery based on the spin-spin-environment model.