Related papers: Kinesin and the Crooks fluctuation theorem
The efficient conversion of thermal energy to mechanical work by a heat engine is an ongoing technological challenge. Since the pioneering work of Carnot, it is known that the efficiency of heat engines is bounded by a fundamental upper…
We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…
Thermodynamic cycles are idealized processes that can convert heat into work or produce heat flow against a temperature gradient with the input of work. They remain an active area of research in modern stochastic thermodynamics. In…
We study the stochastic energetic exchanges in quantum heat engines. Due to microreversibility, these obey a fluctuation relation, called the heat engine fluctuation relation, which implies the Carnot bound: no machine can have an…
A fluctuation theorem relating the work to its optimal average work is presented. The function mediating the relation is increasing and convex, and depends on the switching time $\tau$, driving strength $\delta\lambda/\lambda_0$, and…
We study the optimal performance of Carnot-like heat engines working in low dissipation regime using the product of the efficiency and the power output, also known as the efficient power, as our objective function. Efficient power function…
Work extraction from a heat engine in a cycle by a quantum mechanical device (quantum "piston") is analyzed. The standard definition of work fails in the quantum domain. The correct extractable work and its efficiency bound are shown to…
The chaotic hypothesis has several implications which have generated interest in the literature because of their generality and because a few exact predictions are among them. However its application to Physics problems requires attention…
We present a simple derivation of the integral fluctuation theorems for excess housekeeping heat for an underdamped Langevin system, without using the concept of dual dynamics. In conformity with the earlier results, we find that the…
We study a quantum Stirling cycle which extracts work using quantized energy levels of a potential well. The work and the efficiency of the engine depend on the length of the potential well, and the Carnot efficiency is approached in a low…
Thermal fluctuations are a fundamental feature of dissipative systems that are essential for understanding physics near the expected critical point of QCD and in small systems. When such fluctuations are modeled naively in relativistic…
We investigate the thermodynamic efficiency of sub-micro-scale heat engines operating under the conditions described by over-damped stochastic thermodynamics. We prove that at maximum power the efficiency obeys for constant isotropic…
Recent advances in experimental control of colloidal systems have spurred a revolution in the production of mesoscale thermodynamic devices. Functional "textbook" engines, such as the Stirling and Carnot cycles, have been produced in…
We study the efficiency of a single particle Szilard and Carnot engine. Within a first order correction to the quasi-static limit, the work distribution is found to be Gaussian and the correction factor to average work and efficiency only…
We consider a particle dragged through a medium at constant temperature as described by a Langevin equation with a time-dependent potential. The time-dependence is specified by an external protocol. We give conditions on potential and…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
The fluctuation-dissipation relation for the classical definition of work is extended to thermally isolated systems, in classical and quantum realms. From this, the optimal work variance is calculated, showing it achieves its minimum…
Impact phenomena of small clusters subject to thermal fluctuations are numerically investigated. From the molecular dynamics simulation for colliding two identical clusters, it is found that the restitution coefficient for head-on…
We consider the performance of periodically driven stochastic heat engines in the linear response regime. Reaching the theoretical bounds for efficiency and efficiency at maximum power typically requires full control over the design and the…
In systems described by the scattering theory, there is an upper bound, lower than Carnot, on the efficiency of steady-state heat to work conversion at a given output power. We show that interacting systems can overcome such bound and…