Exponential Improvement for Quantum Cooling through Finite-Memory Effects

Practical implementations of quantum technologies require preparation of states with a high degree of purity—or, in thermodynamic terms, very low temperatures. Given finite resources, the third law of thermodynamics prohibits perfect cooling; nonetheless, attainable upper bounds for the asymptotic ground-state population of a system repeatedly interacting with quantum thermal machines have been derived. These bounds apply within a memoryless (Markovian) setting, in which each refrigeration step proceeds independently of those previous. Here, we expand this framework to study the effects of memory on quantum cooling. By introducing a memory mechanism through a generalized collision model that permits a Markovian embedding, we derive achievable bounds that provide an exponential advantage over the memoryless case. For qubits, our bound coincides with that of heat-bath algorithmic cooling, which our framework generalizes to arbitrary dimensions. We lastly describe the adaptive stepwise optimal protocol that outperforms all standard procedures.