Does “cooling by heating” protect quantum correlations?

Abstract

The connection between nonequilibrium quantum correlations, such as entanglement and quantum discord, and cooling by heating is investigated for a system composed by two atoms interacting with a single electromagnetic mode of a lossy cavity. This Hamiltonian model is experimentally feasible in the quantum optics domain and presents the occurrence of both nonequilibrium quantum correlations and cooling by heating for a range of parameters. Since in the cooling by heating phenomenon the effective temperature of the system decreases even increasing the environments temperature, it could be expected that quantum correlations could be enhanced. Interestingly, for some parameters we show that, contrary to this expectation, in the case studied here the lowering of the system effective temperature leads to no enhancement in the quantum correlations. In addition, we found that at both zero and finite temperature, depending on the parameters used, quantum correlations can be enhanced even when increasing the damping rates, a somewhat counterintuitive result.