Unusual Transport Properties with Noncommutative System–Bath Coupling Operators

Understanding nonequilibrium transport is crucial for controlling energy flow in nanoscale systems. We study thermal energy transfer in a generalized nonequilibrium spin-boson model (NESB) with noncommutative system–bath coupling operators and discover its unusual transport properties. Compared to the conventional NESB, the energy current is greatly enhanced by rotating the system–bath coupling operators. Constructive contribution to thermal rectification can be optimized when two sources of asymmetry, system–bath coupling strength and coupling operators, coexist. At the weak coupling and the adiabatic limit, the scaling dependence of energy current on the coupling strength and the system energy gap changes drastically when the coupling operators become noncommutative. These scaling relations can further be explained analytically by the nonequilibrium polaron-transformed Redfield equation (NE-PTRE). These novel transport properties, arising from the pure quantum effect of noncommutative coupling operators, suggest an unvisited dimension of controlling transport in nanoscale systems and should generally appear in other nonequilibrium set-ups and driven systems.