Thermopower in a boundary driven bosonic ladder in the presence of a gauge field

Abstract

We consider a bosonic two-legged ladder whose two-band energy spectrum can be tuned in the presence of a uniform gauge field, to four distinct scenarios: degenerate or non-degenerate ground states with gapped or gapless energy bands. We couple the ladder to two baths at different temperatures and chemical potentials and analyze the efficiency and power generated in the linear as well as nonlinear response regime. Our results, obtained with the Green's function method, show that the maximum performance efficiency and generated power are strongly dependent on the type of the underlying energy spectrum. We also show that the ideal scenario for efficient energy conversion, as well as power generation, corresponds to the case in which the spectrum has a gap between the bands, and the ground state is degenerate.