English

Universal trade-off relation between power and efficiency for heat engines

Statistical Mechanics 2016-11-02 v3

Abstract

For a general thermodynamic system described as a Markov process, we prove a general lower bound for dissipation in terms of the square of the heat current, thus establishing that nonvanishing current inevitably implies dissipation. This leads to a universal trade-off relation between efficiency and power, with which we rigorously prove that a heat engine with nonvanishing power never attains the Carnot efficiency. Our theory applies to systems arbitrarily far from equilibrium, and does not assume any specific symmetry of the model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.00356,
  title  = {Universal trade-off relation between power and efficiency for heat engines},
  author = {Naoto Shiraishi and Keiji Saito and Hal Tasaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.00356},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

15 pages, 2 figures. This paper is a revised version of https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03645, now withdrawn

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:46:07.955Z