Long-Range Interactions Could Make Dissipative Quantum Batteries Easier to Charge

Quantum batteries sound futuristic, but the core problem is familiar: how do you put energy into a fragile device quickly, keep losses from stealing the gain, and make sure the stored energy is actually usable? In the quantum version, “usable” has a precise name: ergotropy, the maximum work that can be extracted from a quantum state by allowed operations. A battery that merely heats up is not enough. The stored state must be ordered in a way that can do work.

A new June 2026 arXiv preprint by Shishira Mahunta and Victor Mukherjee of IISER Berhampur takes that problem into one of the hardest settings: an open quantum critical system, where the device is driven through a critical point while also interacting with an environment. Their paper, Long-range interactions assisted shortcuts to adiabaticity and battery charging in open quantum critical systems, argues that long-range couplings can be a practical resource rather than a nuisance. In their long-range Kitaev-chain model, making interactions extend farther can reduce the severity of the control fields needed for shortcuts to adiabaticity and can enhance battery ergotropy under dissipation.

The important idea is not simply “more interaction is better.” It is that the range of interaction changes the critical energy landscape, and that can make fast, low-loss quantum charging protocols less impossible to implement.

The result belongs squarely in the Floquet and quantum-energy conversation. Shortcuts to adiabaticity are often implemented through time-dependent control fields, and Floquet engineering supplies a natural language for designing effective Hamiltonians from repeated drives. The paper also cites Floquet-engineered counterdiabatic protocols in many-body systems and previous work showing that Floquet-driven long-range interactions can produce superextensive charging behaviour. The new contribution is to bring long-range control, open-system dissipation, and quantum-battery ergotropy into the same analysis.

Why critical systems are hard to charge quickly

Critical points are attractive because they can amplify response. Near a phase transition, tiny changes in a control parameter can produce large changes in a many-body state. That is useful for sensors, engines, simulators, and battery protocols that want collective enhancement. But criticality has a cost: the energy gap closes. When a system is driven across a closing gap, it tends to create non-adiabatic excitations. In everyday terms, the system cannot smoothly keep up with the changing control knob.

The textbook cure is to drive slowly. A perfectly adiabatic transformation keeps the system in its instantaneous target state. Unfortunately, “slow” is a bad word for a battery. Charging slowly may reduce internal friction, but it also lowers power and gives environmental losses more time to act. The more ambitious cure is a shortcut to adiabaticity, or STA: add carefully designed controls that force the system to follow the desired path in finite time.

STA is one of the most powerful ideas in modern quantum thermodynamics. It appears in protocols for quantum annealing, finite-time engines, state preparation, and driven many-body systems. Berry’s transitionless quantum driving formalism gave a clean theoretical route for closed systems, while later work extended the discussion to open systems governed by dissipative dynamics. The catch is implementability. The exact counterdiabatic term required near a critical point may involve many-body, nonlocal interactions that are far beyond what a laboratory can easily build.

The long-range Kitaev chain as a test bed

Mahunta and Mukherjee analyze a one-dimensional long-range Kitaev chain: a model of spinless fermions with nearest-neighbour hopping, a time-dependent chemical potential, and long-range pairing terms that decay as a power law with distance. The decay is controlled by an exponent α. Large α means interactions are effectively short-range; smaller α means farther-apart sites still talk to one another appreciably. The authors focus on α greater than 1 so the energy spectrum remains well-behaved.

The model has two quantum critical points, at chemical potentials μ = −1 and μ = +1 in their units. Crucially, the two points do not respond to interaction range in the same way. Near μ = −1, making interactions more long-range increases the relevant energy gap structure in a way that helps control. Near μ = +1, the advantage disappears because the dispersion behaves differently. This asymmetry matters because it prevents a simplistic headline. Long-range interactions are not a universal magic ingredient; they are useful when they reshape the spectrum in the right direction.

For the favourable critical region, the paper finds a sharp contrast between short-range and long-range behaviour. In a short-range limit, the counterdiabatic interaction strength can become effectively independent of distance at criticality, meaning the exact STA protocol would require controlling infinitely distant spins with nonzero strength. In the long-range regime, especially 1 < α < 2, the required strength decays algebraically with separation. That is still demanding, but it is qualitatively more physical: distant terms become weaker rather than remaining stubbornly finite.

For quantum hardware, the difference between “control every distance equally” and “control strength falls with distance” is the difference between a beautiful equation and a protocol that might someday be approximated.

Open systems: where the thermodynamics becomes real

The paper’s title emphasizes open quantum critical systems. That matters because every realistic quantum battery is open. It exchanges heat, information, and noise with its surroundings. A closed-system charging protocol may look perfect on a blackboard, but dissipation can turn stored work into unusable heat or drag the system away from its designed trajectory.

In the open-system part of the analysis, Mahunta and Mukherjee study engineered unitary and non-unitary controls. The non-unitary side is especially thermodynamic: it involves controlling population and entropy flow, not merely phase. Their conclusion is that long-range interactions can reduce the cost of STA in the presence of dissipation, with the cost connected to the magnitude of heat current required by the control protocol. In other words, the range of the microscopic coupling influences not only coherent state following, but also the thermal burden of enforcing that path.

This is precisely the kind of accounting that beyond-Carnot research needs. A driven quantum machine can always look better if one ignores the cost of the drive or the entropy exported to the environment. The useful question is whether a protocol improves work extraction after the control overhead is included. By tracking heat, power, and ergotropy rather than only state fidelity, the paper aligns with the growing insistence that quantum advantage in energy devices must survive a full thermodynamic audit.

How the battery protocol works

The authors then reinterpret their controlled open critical chain as a quantum battery. The goal is not just to move the system gently through a transition; it is to create population inversion and increase ergotropy despite dissipation. Their modified STA-inspired protocol uses the same spectral asymmetry that made long-range interactions helpful near μ = −1. When the interaction range is longer, the system can reach states with higher extractable work in that favourable region.

The result is not a claim that a commercial quantum battery is around the corner. It is a design principle for the next generation of experiments and simulations. If a platform can tune interaction range — as trapped ions, Rydberg arrays, cavity-mediated systems, and some quantum simulators can — then interaction range becomes a control knob for work storage. The question changes from “How strong should the charging pulse be?” to “What interaction geometry makes the charging pulse thermodynamically cheaper?”

The Floquet connection

Although this new preprint is not narrowly a “Floquet battery” paper, its implications are strongly Floquet-adjacent. Periodic driving is one of the main ways laboratories synthesize long-range or otherwise hard-to-realize effective interactions. Floquet engineering can create counterdiabatic terms, dress tunnelling amplitudes, and generate synthetic couplings that are absent in the static Hamiltonian. Claeys, Pandey, Sels, and Polkovnikov demonstrated in 2019 that Floquet engineering can be used to build counterdiabatic protocols in quantum many-body systems. More recently, work by Puri and collaborators has argued that Floquet-driven long-range interactions can induce superextensive scaling in quantum batteries.

Mahunta and Mukherjee add a complementary message: if long-range structure can be engineered, it may reduce the burden of controlling an open, critical, dissipative device. That is exactly where Floquet methods are most valuable. They do not merely “shake” a system; they let researchers sculpt the effective geometry of interactions, gaps, and response functions over a drive cycle.

For floquet.ca readers, the practical takeaway is a checklist for future driven battery claims:

• Does the drive increase ergotropy, or only total energy?
• Does the control cost fall, once heat currents and switching overhead are counted?
• Is the advantage tied to a specific critical point or spectral region, rather than advertised as universal?
• Can the required interactions be approximated by realistic Floquet, cavity, ion-trap, or Rydberg controls?

What to watch next

The next step is experimental translation. Trapped-ion simulators naturally support tunable power-law interactions. Rydberg arrays and cavity-mediated architectures can also create nonlocal couplings, although dissipation and control errors remain central challenges. A convincing demonstration would not need to implement the exact infinite theoretical protocol. It could test whether approximated long-range controls improve charging power and ergotropy relative to short-range controls under matched dissipation.

The broader lesson is that quantum batteries are becoming less like cartoon energy buckets and more like engineered nonequilibrium pathways. Energy storage depends on spectral geometry, interaction topology, dissipation, and control cost. Long-range interactions are not automatically good. But this paper shows that when they reshape a critical gap in the right way, they can make the impossible-looking control problem more tractable.

That is a mature kind of progress. It does not promise free energy or a violation of thermodynamics. It identifies a resource — interaction range — and asks how it changes the real accounting of work, heat, and control. For quantum energy research, that is exactly the level at which useful devices will be designed.

Sources: Shishira Mahunta and Victor Mukherjee, “Long-range interactions assisted shortcuts to adiabaticity and battery charging in open quantum critical systems,” arXiv:2606.07221 (submitted June 5, 2026); P. W. Claeys, M. Pandey, D. Sels, and A. Polkovnikov, “Floquet-engineering counterdiabatic protocols in quantum many-body systems,” Physical Review Letters 123, 090602 (2019); A. Hartmann, V. Mukherjee, W. Niedenzu, and W. Lechner, “Many-body quantum heat engines with shortcuts to adiabaticity,” Physical Review Research 2, 023145 (2020); A. Solfanelli, G. Giachetti, M. Campisi, S. Ruffo, and N. Defenu, “Quantum heat engine with long-range advantages,” New Journal of Physics 25, 033030 (2023); S. Puri, T. K. Konar, L. G. C. Lakkaraju, and A. S. De, “Floquet driven long-range interactions induce superextensive scaling in quantum batteries,” arXiv:2412.00921.