Related papers: Thermo-charged capacitors and the Second Law of Th…

Recently [Physics Letters A, 374, (2010) 1801] the concept of vacuum capacitor spontaneously charged harnessing the heat from a single thermal reservoir at room temperature has been introduced, along with a mathematical description of its…

In this brief note we describe two devices, a sort of flat and spherical capacitor, with which one should be able to test the possibility of creating a macroscopic voltage, and thus exploitable current, out of a single thermal source at…

We theoretically consider a graphene ripple as a Brownian particle coupled to an energy storage circuit. When circuit and particle are at the same temperature, the second law forbids harvesting energy from the thermal motion of the Brownian…

We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…

This study is presented in a series of two papers. The first paper is an analytical study. This is the second paper, and here we numerically study the thermal energy harvesting capability of two electronic circuits. The first circuit…

We discuss the low-frequency response of charge and heat transport to oscillatory voltage and temperature shifts in mesoscopic capacitors. We obtain within scattering theory generic expressions for the quantum admittances up to second order…

We show that a cyclic unitary process can extract work from the thermodynamic equilibrium state of an engineered quantum dissipative process. Systems in the equilibrium states of these processes serve as batteries, storing energy. The…

Recent theoretical research on the fundamentals of statistical mechanics has led to a remarkable discovery [2-4]: with a locally nonchaotic energy barrier, a macroscopic system may produce useful work in a cycle by absorbing heat from a…

We describe how electromagnetically induced transparency may be used to construct a non-traditional near-ideal quantum heat engine as constrained by the Second Law. The engine is pumped by a thermal reservoir that may be either hotter or…

A model of a conducting cylinder with a radial temperature gradient which creates an electric field that increases with time in the surrounding vacuum is examined. The conditions under which this model functions are pointed out. An electric…

The temperature dependence of the dielectric permittivity is taken into account to study the energy change in a capacitor that follows a cycle between a cold and a hot thermal reservoirs. There is a net energy gain in the process that, in…

We have considered the response at two energies corresponding to two plateaus in the quantum Hall effect. Since the thermoelectric power involves the derivative of conductivity with respect to energy, we introduce the concept of a line…

A well-known high-school problem asking the final temperature of two spheres that are given the same amount of heat, one lying on a table and the other hanging from a thread, is re-examined. The conventional solution states that the sphere…

Quantum batteries have recently emerged as promising candidates for microscopic energy-storage technologies exploiting uniquely quantum mechanical effects. In this work, we introduce the concept of a quantum capacitor, a quantum device…

The equations of fluid motions are considered in the case of internal energy depending on mass density, volume entropy and their spatial derivatives. The model corresponds to domains with large density gradients in which the temperature is…

The electric field in an extended phase of a liquid electrolyte exposed to a temperature gradient is attributed to different thermophoretic mobilities of the ion species. As shown herein, such Soret-type ion thermodiffusion is not required…

Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…

We theoretically study thermal transport in an electronic interferometer comprising a parallel circuit of two quantum dots, each of which has a tunable single electronic state which are connected to two leads at different temperature.As a…

We discuss contributions to the thermopower in an electron fluid. A simple argument based on Newton's second law with the pressure gradient as the force suggests that the thermopower is given by a thermodynamic derivative, viz., the entropy…

We demonstrate that a thermal transistor can be made up with a quantum system of 3 interacting subsystems , coupled to a thermal reservoir each. This thermal transistor is analogous to an electronic bipolar one with the ability to control…