Locally Passive, Globally Charged Quantum Batteries: Coherence-Controlled Work and the Robustness of the Stored Charge

A solvable charger–battery model is introduced in which quantum coherence controls both where a quantum battery’s charge is stored and how robustly it survives noise. Charging converts the charger’s coherence into charger–battery entanglement and splits the deposited work between a locally extractable part and a correlation-locked part accessible only through joint operations; for a qubit, the split obeys an exact complementarity, and at maximal coherence, the battery is locally passive with the entire charge locked in correlations. Robustness follows local accessibility: the stored energy and locally extractable work are population-based, immune to pure dephasing, and limited only by relaxation, with an energy half-life, whereas the correlation-locked work is fragile to both dephasing and relaxation. Dephasing, global and local depolarization, and amplitude damping are treated through a single gain–loss competition algebra, and the resulting storage lifetimes are made concrete with superconducting-transmon parameters.