Optimal thermal refrigerator

Abstract

We study a refrigerator model which consists of two $n$-level systems interacting via a pulsed external field. Each system couples to its own thermal bath at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively ($θ\equiv T_c/T_h<1$). The refrigerator functions in two steps: thermally isolated interaction between the systems driven by the external field and isothermal relaxation back to equilibrium. There is a complementarity between the power of heat transfer from the cold bath and the efficiency: the latter nullifies when the former is maximized and {\it vice versa}. A reasonable compromise is achieved by optimizing over the inter-system interaction and intra-system energy levels the product of the heat-power and efficiency. The efficiency is then found to be bounded from below by $ζ_{\rm CA}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-θ}}-1$ (an analogue of Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency for refrigerators), besides being bound from above by the Carnot efficiency $ζ_{\rm C} = \frac{1}{1-θ}-1$. The lower bound is reached in the equilibrium limit $θ\to 1$, while the Carnot bound is reached (for a finite power and a finite amount of heat transferred per cycle) in the macroscopic limit $\ln n\gg 1$. The efficiency is exactly equal to $ζ_{\rm CA}$, when the above optimization is constrained by assuming homogeneous energy spectra for both systems.

4 pages, 2 figures