Enhancing the performances of autonomous quantum refrigerators via two-photon transitions

Abstract Conventional autonomous quantum refrigerators rely on uncorrelated heat exchange between the working system and baths via two-body interactions enabled by single-photon transitions and positive-temperature work baths, inherently limiting their cooling performance. Here, we introduce distinct qutrit refrigerators that exploit correlated heat transfer via two-photon transitions with the hot and cold baths, yielding a genuine enhancement in performance over conventional qutrit refrigerators that employ uncorrelated heat transfer. These refrigerators achieve at least a twofold enhancement in cooling power and reliability compared to conventional counterparts. Moreover, we show that cooling power and reliability can be further enhanced simultaneously by several folds, even surpassing existing cooling limits, by utilizing a synthetic negative-temperature work bath. Such refrigerators can be realized by combining correlated heat transfer and synthetic work baths, which consist of a four-level system coupled to hot and cold baths and two conventional work baths via two independent two-photon transitions. Here, the composition of two work baths effectively creates a synthetic negative-temperature work bath under suitable parameter choices. Additionally, our autonomous refrigerators with negative temperature baths significantly outperform previously studied autonomous and non-autonomous refrigerators in terms of cooling ability without requiring any additional energy resources, as they cool the cold bath to much lower temperature, which is forbidden for others refrigerators. Our results demonstrate that correlated heat transfers and baths with negative temperatures can yield thermodynamic advantages in quantum devices. Finally, we discuss the experimental feasibility of the proposed refrigerators across various existing platforms.