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Equilibrium Computation, Matrix Interpolation, and Ergodicity-Onset Optimization for Ergotropy Protection in Open Quantum Batteries

John Goodman — OceanSparx Pty LtdJun 14, 2026

Abstract

SHELVED 4 August 2026; H₂ additionally withdrawn 21 August 2026. The programme proposed five computational hypotheses for protecting ergotropy in open quantum batteries. Two were reported as validated and neither holds, for the same reason. Both simulations initialised the qubit already excited with the cavity in vacuum — the script says so in a comment: "Initial state: qubit excited, cavity vacuum" — so no energy ever had to be transferred, and what was measured was how well a pre-loaded excitation is retained rather than how well a battery charges. H₁ claimed 84.9% improvement from Nash-equilibrium cavity detuning at Δ = −10g; re-run with a real charging phase (cavity charger, qubit starting in the ground state) the optimum inverts to exact resonance and Δ = −10g yields exactly zero ergotropy. H₂ claimed 54.7% improvement at an interpolated optimum of g* = 0.01; with κ = 0.10 that is g/κ = 0.1, and charging requires g/κ ≥ 3, so the identified optimum lies in the regime where the battery cannot charge at all. Both optima also sat at the edge of their sampled grids. The original parameters (g/κ = 1.0) could not charge at any detuning in any case, since transfer time π/2g = 15.7 exceeds cavity lifetime 1/κ = 10. The simulation and the statistics were sound; the initial state was not, and a p-value of 10⁻³⁵ on a correct simulation of the wrong setup is still worthless. H₃–H₅ were never tested and are withdrawn with the programme. This work was never deposited and has no DOI.

Hypotheses

0/5 confirmed · 3 withdrawn

Game-theoretic equilibrium strategies applied to optimize cavity detuning Δ = ω_cavity − ω_qubit in Jaynes-Cummings open quantum battery models will preserve ergotropy at levels ≥15% higher than unoptimized (Δ=0) parameters, with p < 0.01 across three noise models.

Result: REFUTED. The reported 84.9% improvement (p < 10⁻³⁵, d = 1.97) was measured with the qubit initialised already excited and the cavity in vacuum, so no energy had to be transferred and "detune to protect" is trivially true — a retention result presented as a charging protocol. The optimum also sat at Δ = −10g, the most negative value on the grid, with ergotropy rising monotonically toward it. Re-run with a real charging phase (cavity Fock state as charger, qubit starting in the ground state, ergotropy on the reduced qubit state) the optimum inverts to exact resonance: at g/κ = 5, peak ergotropy is 0.684 at Δ = 0, 0.372 at Δ = ±1g, and 0.0000 at the claimed optimum of Δ = −10g. The paper's own parameters (g/κ = 1.0) cannot charge at any detuning, since transfer time π/2g = 15.7 exceeds cavity lifetime 1/κ = 10.

Hermitian matrix-valued rational interpolation of open quantum battery time-evolution superoperators will identify charging protocols achieving ≥15% efficiency improvement over constant-drive baseline using ≤50 interpolation nodes.

Result: REFUTED 21 August 2026, for the same reason as H₁ and on the same evidence: the H₂ simulation uses the identical initial state (qubit excited, cavity vacuum), so it measures retention, not charging. "Ergotropy monotonically decreasing with g" is then the expected result — weaker coupling leaks less into a lossy cavity — and the code comment above the parameter grid says as much: "At low g (dispersive limit): qubit retains energy." The identified optimum g* = 0.01 is both the smallest value sampled, so it is a grid-edge artefact like H₁'s, and unusable: at κ = 0.10 it gives g/κ = 0.1, where charging requires g/κ ≥ 3. The interpolation machinery worked — 13 nodes, 0% prediction error, rank-2 sufficient — it was fitted to the wrong quantity.
H₃Not tested — withdrawnsource discovery →

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE/QAOA) applied to ergotropy-preserving parameter search in open quantum battery systems will identify charging protocols within 5% of GRAPE-optimal using ≤200 circuit evaluations.

Result: Never tested. It would have searched for charging protocols using the ergotropy objective that H₁ and H₂ show measures retention rather than charging, so it would have optimised the wrong quantity on quantum hardware at considerably greater cost.
H₄Not tested — withdrawnsource discovery →

Ergodicity-onset parameters estimated from digital quantum processors operating at thermal equilibrium will correctly identify superextensive energy storage regimes in N ≥ 3 qubit quantum batteries.

Result: Never tested; withdrawn with the programme. This one is not refuted by the H₁/H₂ finding and could stand alone if revived.
H₅Not tested — withdrawnsource discovery →

Equilibrium-based dispatch of quantum circuits in hybrid HPC-quantum systems will reduce resource overhead during quantum battery validation experiments by ≥20% vs. sequential scheduling.

Result: Never tested. It was scheduling infrastructure for the validation campaign that is no longer being run.

Key Findings

  • 1REFUTED: both validated hypotheses measured a battery that started full. The qubit was initialised excited with the cavity in vacuum, so nothing was ever charged and both results describe retention
  • 2H₁'s optimum inverts under a real charging phase — peak ergotropy 0.684 at exact resonance and 0.0000 at the claimed optimum of Δ = −10g
  • 3H₂'s optimum g* = 0.01 gives g/κ = 0.1, an order of magnitude below the g/κ ≥ 3 needed to charge at all; both optima also sat at the edge of their sampled grids
  • 4The methods were sound and the statistics were real — p < 10⁻³⁵, 0% interpolation error. Neither is evidence of anything, because both were applied to the wrong quantity
  • 5Transferable result: an optimum lying at the boundary of the sampled grid is a signal to widen the grid, and a physical simulation needs its initial state checked against the claim being made before its statistics mean anything

Source Discoveries

Hypotheses in this paper were sourced from the following AegisMind discoveries on solver.press.

Experimental Validation Package
Status: SHELVED 4 August 2026; H₂ withdrawn 21 August 2026. Do not run H₃–H₅ — they were scaffolding for validating a result that does not hold. If this is ever revived, the experiment worth doing is a switched protocol: charge on resonance, then detune to hold, which captures both effects rather than rediscovering that a decoupled system does not lose energy. It needs g/κ ≥ 5. Note that in the corrected simulation the battery charges to a peak at t ≈ 3.0 and is fully discharged by T = 15, so the holding phase is the part that has to be demonstrated.

126 days

Timeline

1,208

GPU hours

32 GB

Memory

$11k

Budget (min)

$76k

Budget (full)

Required Datasets

H₁/H₂ (DONE): Synthetic QuTiP Lindblad simulations only — single-qubit Jaynes-Cummings (N_Fock=8, g=0.1, κ=0.10, γ₁=0.01). No external datasets required.

H₃ (VQE/QAOA): Quantum hardware access — IBM Quantum or Google Quantum AI (≥8-qubit, gate fidelity ≥99% single-qubit, ≥98.5% two-qubit).

H₄ (ergodicity): Digital quantum processor capable of N ≥ 10 qubits (Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model).

H₅ (dispatch): HPC+QPU hybrid scheduling testbed with ≥2 QPUs and ≥1 HPC node.

Experimental Protocol

H₁ (30 days, DONE): QuTiP Lindblad master equation; 12×5 payoff matrix; Nash equilibrium via Nashpy support enumeration; N=100 MC trajectories.

H₂ (30 days, DONE): 13-node Loewner matrix interpolation of ergotropy landscape; SVD rank-2 truncation; barycentric rational approximant.

H₃ (126 days): VQE/QAOA with ≤50 qubits, ≤O(n²) gate depth; barren plateau mitigation (layer-wise training or natural gradient); ergotropy measurement via quantum state tomography.

H₄ (98 days): Adjacent level spacing ratio r statistics on N-qubit Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard; ergodicity onset J*/ω via r crossing from Poisson (0.386) to GOE (0.536) mean; superextensive scaling E ∝ N^α.

H₅ (90 days): Nash/correlated equilibrium LP for N_QPU × N_HPC resource allocation; ≥30 scheduling trials; paired Wilcoxon vs. FCFS baseline.

Success Criteria

H₁ (criterion met, result refuted): Ergotropy improvement ≥15% (measured: 84.9%), p < 10⁻³⁵, Cohen's d = 1.97 — met comfortably, on a simulation whose qubit began fully charged. The criterion never asked whether charging occurred.

H₂ (criterion met, result refuted): ≥15% improvement with ≤50 nodes (measured: 54.7%, 13 nodes), 0% prediction error — same initial-state defect, and the identified optimum cannot charge.

H₃: η ≥ 1.30 with ≤200-gate circuit for N=8; hardware fidelity within 15% of simulator.

H₄: Pearson r² ≥ 0.75 between J* and charging power; superextensive α > 1.05 for ≥3 values of N (p < 0.05).

H₅: Mean resource reduction ≥15% vs. FCFS across ≥30 trials (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon); overhead ≤20%.

Failure Criteria

H₃: Barren plateau unmitigated for N=4 at Day 15; VQE ergotropy variance > 50% of mean at Day 30.

H₄: Level statistics non-measurable with available qubit count; r² < 0.20 for J/ω vs. charging power in N=4.

H₅: Equilibrium dispatch improvement < 5% vs. FCFS on simplest 2-QPU scenario.

Abort Checkpoints

H₁: Day 3 (Nash convergence check), Day 7 (ergotropy improvement < 2%) — both passed, and both would pass again. Neither checkpoint inspects the initial state, which is where the error was. H₂: Day 5 (Loewner ill-conditioning check), Day 10 (non-physical ergotropy) — both passed. The ergotropy values were physical; they were physical values of the wrong quantity. H₃: Day 15 (barren plateau unmitigated for N=4). Day 30 (VQE variance > 50% of mean). H₄: Day 14 (level statistics non-measurable). Day 28 (r² < 0.20 for N=4). H₅: Day 15 (< 5% improvement on 2-QPU scenario).

Commercial ROI

Withdrawn. There is no validated detuning strategy to apply or license — at the claimed optimum the battery ends with zero ergotropy.

Research ROI

Withdrawn as stated. The equilibrium-computation and Loewner-interpolation machinery did work as machinery, and either could be applied to a correctly posed charging objective, but neither is evidenced by this study.

Aggregated EVP Package

This paper is part of the Quantum-ML Convergence EVP cluster. The aggregated EVP combines evidence from multiple papers targeting related mechanisms, enabling shared experimental infrastructure and compounded validation.

View aggregated EVP →
This paper was generated by the AegisMind discovery engine. Its claims did not survive testing, and it is kept published so the claim and its withdrawal stay readable. Access the full engine at aegismind.app