Quantum walks as a tool to design robust quantum batteries: the role of topology and chirality

Abstract

The maximum work that can be extracted from a quantum battery is bounded by the ergotropy of the system, which is determined by the spectral properties of the Hamiltonian. In this paper, we employ the formalism of quantum walks to investigate how the topology of the battery and the chirality of the Hamiltonian influence its performance as an energy storage unit. We analyze architectures of battery cells based on ring, complete, and wheel graph structures and analyze their behavior in the presence of noise. Our results show that these structures exhibit distinct ergotropy scaling, with the interplay between chirality and topology providing a tunable mechanism to optimize work extraction and enhance robustness against decoherence. In particular, chirality enhances ergotropy for complete quantum cells, without altering the linear scaling with size, whereas in ring cells, it bridges the performance gap between configurations with odd and even number of units. Additionaly, chirality may be exploited to force degeneracies in the Hamiltonian, a condition that can spare the ergotropy to vanish in the presence of pure dephasing. We conclude that topology and chirality are key resources for improving ergotropy, offering guidelines to optimize quantum energy devices and protocols.