Quantum energy teleportation across a three-spin Ising chain in a Gibbs state
In general, it is important to identify what is the informational resource for quantum tasks. Quantum energy teleportation (QET) is a quantum task, which attains energy transfer in an operational sense by local operations and classical communication, and is expected to play a role in future development of nano-scale smart grids. We consider QET protocols in a three-element Ising spin system with non-periodic boundary conditions coupled to a thermal bath. The open chain is the minimal model of QET between two edge spins that allows the measurement and operation steps of the QET protocol to be optimized without restriction. It is possible to analyze how two-body correlations of the system, such as mutual information, entanglement and quantum discord, can be resources of this QET at each temperature. In particular, we stress that quantum discord is not the QET resource in some cases, even if arbitrary measurements and operations are available.