The finite-time operation of a quantum heat engine that uses a single
particle as a working medium generally increases the output power at the
expense of inducing friction that lowers the cycle efficiency. We propose to
scale up a quantum heat engine utilizing a many-particle working medium in
combination with the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity to boost the nonadiabatic
performance by eliminating quantum friction and reducing the cycle time. To
this end, we first analyze the finite-time thermodynamics of a quantum Otto
cycle implemented with a quantum fluid confined in a time-dependent harmonic
trap. We show that nonadiabatic effects can be controlled and tailored to match
the adiabatic performance using a variety of shortcuts to adiabaticity. As a
result, the nonadiabatic dynamics of the scaled-up many-particle quantum heat
engine exhibits no friction and the cycle can be run at maximum efficiency with
a tunable output power. We demonstrate our results with a working medium
consisting of particles with inverse-square pairwise interactions, that
includes noninteracting and hard-core bosons as limiting cases.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; typo in Eq. (51) fixed. Feature paper in the
Special Issue "Quantum Thermodynamics" edited by Prof. Dr. Ronnie Koslof
