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From the steam engine to current nano-devices, the design of efficient thermal machines has been instrumental in modern societies. In its essence a thermal engine can be thought as a working substance, in contact with two or more baths,…
In Szilard's engine, measurement and feedback allows to extract work from an equilibrium environment, a process otherwise forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics. Recent theoretical developments have established fluctuation theorems and…
The quantum analog of Carnot cycles in few-particle systems consists of two quantum adiabatic steps and two isothermal steps. This construction is formally justified by use of a minimum work principle. It is then shown, without relying on…
The realization of microscopic heat engines has gained a surge of research interest in statistical physics, soft matter, and biological physics. A typical microscopic heat engine employs a colloidal particle trapped in a confining…
Quantum heat engines are modeled by thermodynamic cycles with quantum-mechanical working media. Since high engine efficiencies require adiabaticity, a major challenge is to yield a nonvanishing power output at finite cycle times. Shortcuts…
Thermodynamics of nanoscale devices is an active area of research. Despite their noisy surround- ing they often produce mechanical work (e.g. micro-heat engines) or display rectified Brownian motion (e.g. molecular motors). This invokes the…
For a condensate in a one-dimensional ring geometry, we compare the thermodynamic properties of three conceptually different classical field techniques: stochastic dynamics, microcanonical molecular dynamics, and the classical field method.…
A quantum heat engine of a specific type is studied. This engine contains a single particle confined in the infinite square well potential with variable width and consists of three processes: the isoenergetic process (which has no classical…
Equilibrium statistics of finite Hamiltonian systems is fundamentally described by the microcanonical ensemble (ME). Canonical, or grand-canonical partition functions are deduced from this by Laplace transform. Only in the thermodynamic…
We propose a simple classical dynamical model of a thermoelectric (or thermochemical) heat engine based on a pair of ideal gas containers connected by two unequal scattering channels. The model is solved analytically and it is shown that a…
A new approach to describe comminution processes in general ball mills as a macroscopic canonical ensemble is proposed. Using hamiltonian method, the model is able to take simultaneously into account the internal dynamics from mechanical…
We report the experimental realization of a single-atom heat engine. An ion is confined in a linear Paul trap with tapered geometry and driven thermally by coupling it alternately to hot and cold reservoirs. The output power of the engine…
An analytical method to compute thermodynamic properties of a given Hamiltonian system is proposed. This method combines ideas of both dynamical systems and ensemble approaches to thermodynamics, providing de facto a possible alternative to…
Collective effects have attracted remarkable recent interest, not only for their presence in several systems in nature but also for the possibility of being used for the construction of efficient engine setups. Notwithstanding, little is…
The purity of quantum states is a key requirement for many quantum applications. Improving the purity is limited by fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Here we are probing the fundamental limits for a natural approach to this problem,…
According to the laws of thermodynamics, no heat engine can beat the efficiency of a Carnot cycle. This efficiency traditionally comes with vanishing power output and practical designs, optimized for power, generally achieve far less.…
Linear programming is used as a standard tool for optimising unit commitment or power flows in energy supply systems. For heat supply systems, however, it faces a relevant limitation: For them, energy yield depends on the output…
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
We consider a harmonic oscillator under periodic driving and coupled to two harmonic-oscillator heat baths at different temperatures. We use the thermofield transformation with chain mapping for this setup, which allows us to study the…