Related papers: Cooling classical particles with a microcanonical …
Artificial micro heat engines are prototypical models to explore and elucidate the mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1-2]. Micro heat engines realized hitherto mimicked their macroscopic…
A pair of systems at different temperatures is a classic environment for a heat engine, which produces work during the relaxation to a common equilibrium. It is generally believed that a direct interaction between the two systems will…
Under a general framework, shortcuts to adiabatic processes are shown to be possible in classical systems. We then study the distribution function of the work done on a small system initially prepared at thermal equilibrium. It is found…
Hybrid quantum systems can often be described in terms of polaritons. These are quasiparticles formed of superpositions of their constituents, with relative weights depending on some control parameter in their interaction. In many cases,…
We present a simple kinematic model of a non-equilibrium steady state device, which can operate either as a heat engine or as a refrigerator. The model is composed of two or more scattering channels where the motion is fully described by…
Heat engines are fundamental physical objects to develop nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The thermodynamic performance of the heat engine is determined by the choice of cycle and time-dependence of parameters. Here, we propose a systematic…
Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…
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…
The grand canonical ensemble lies at the core of quantum and classical statistical mechanics. A small system thermalizes to this ensemble while exchanging heat and particles with a bath. A quantum system may exchange quantities represented…
It is possible to extract work from a quantum-mechanical system whose dynamics is governed by a time-dependent cyclic Hamiltonian. An energy bath is required to operate such a quantum engine in place of the heat bath used to run a…
A theoretical thermodynamic cycle more efficient than an infinite set of Carnot engines is presented. This result is unexpected from the point of view of classical thermodynamics.
In a recently published letter [S. W. Kim, T. Sagawa, S. DeLiberato, and M. Ueda, PRL 106, 070401 (2011)] the influence of particle statistics on extractable work in the Szilard engine was discussed. We point out that the expressions given…
The out of equilibrium nature of active systems can be exploited for the design of information-based engines. We design two types of an active Szilard engine that use a Maxwell daemon to extract work from an active bath composed of…
We show experimental results demonstrating multiple rounds of heat-bath algorithmic cooling in a 3 qubit solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor. By dynamically pumping entropy out of the system of interest and…
The Szil\'ard engine is a mechanism (akin to Maxwell's demon) for converting information into energy, which seemingly violates the second law of thermodynamics. Originally a classical thought experiment, it was extended to a quantized…
The Szilard engine stands as a compelling illustration of the intricate interplay between information and thermodynamics. While at thermodynamic equilibrium, the apparent breach of the second law of thermodynamics was reconciled by Landauer…
The lack of a procedure to determine equilibrium thermodynamic properties of a small system interacting with a bath is frequently seen as a weakness of conventional statistical mechanics. A typical example for such a small system is a…
We have found the optimal condition of the work performed by the quantum Szilard engine (SZE) containing multi-particles. Usually the optimal work of a cyclic engine is achieved when the whole thermodynamic process is reversible. Although…
In this work we extend the applicability of the microcanonical ensemble simulation method, originally proposed to study the Ising model (A. H\"uller and M. Pleimling, Int. Journal of Modern Physics C, 13, 947 (2002),…
Thermodynamics, which describes vast systems, has been reconciled with small scales, relevant to single-molecule experiments, in resource theories. Resource theories have been used to model exchanges of energy and information. Recently,…