Related papers: Thermodynamics of enhanced heat transfer: a model …
Adaptive physical and biological systems continually process fluctuating information from their environments. When the environment is nonstationary, inference itself becomes a nonequilibrium process with thermodynamic cost. We analyse a…
Conventional autonomous quantum refrigerators rely on uncorrelated heat exchange between the working system and baths via two-body interactions enabled by single-photon transitions and positive-temperature work baths, inherently limiting…
A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''.…
Heat transport in turbulent thermal convection increases with the thermal forcing, but in almost all studies the rate of this increase is slower than it would be if transport became independent of the molecular diffusivities -- the heat…
Thermodynamic behaviors in a quantum Brownian motion coupled to a classical heat bath is studied. We then define a heat operator by generalizing the stochastic energetics and show the energy balance (first law) and the upper bound of the…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
The efficiency of macroscopic heat engines is restricted by the second law of thermodynamics. They can reach at most the efficiency of a Carnot engine. In contrast, heat currents in mesoscopic heat engines show fluctuations. Thus, there is…
The understanding of heat transport in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is an important research frontier, which is crucial for implementing novel thermodynamic devices, such as heat engines and refrigerators. The convection, conduction, and…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…
We study heat conduction in a one-dimensional {finite}, unpinned chain of atoms perturbed by stochastic momentum exchange and coupled to Langevin heat baths at {possibly} distinct temperatures placed at the endpoints of the chain. While…
We examine the efficiency of an effective two-terminal thermoelectric device under broken time-reversal symmetry. The setup is derived from a three-terminal thermoelectric device comprising a thermal terminal and two electronic contacts,…
The quest to identify the best heat engine has been at the center of science and technology. Thermoelectric nanoscale heat engines convert heat flows into useful work in the form of electrical power and promise the realization of on-chip…
We derive the efficiency at maximal power of a scale-invariant (critical) quantum junction in exact form. Both Fermi and Bose statistics are considered. We show that time-reversal invariance is spontaneously broken. For fermions we…
We consider two modifications of a recently proposed three-terminal quantum dot heat engine. First, we investigate the necessity of the thermalization assumption, namely that electrons are always thermalized by inelastic processes when…
It is argued that a typical many body energy eigenstate has a well defined thermodynamic entropy and that individual eigenstates possess thermodynamic characteristics analogous to those of generic isolated systems. We examine large systems…
We experimentally probe the interplay of the quantum switch with the laws of thermodynamics. The quantum switch places two channels in a superposition of orders and may be applied to thermalizing channels. Quantum-switching thermal channels…
We extend the translationally invariant quantum East model to an inhomogeneous chain with East/West heterojunction structure. In analogy to the quantum diffusion of substantial particles, we observe a cyclic entanglement entropy spreading…
Whether the strong coupling to thermal baths can improve the performance of quantum thermal machines remains an open issue under active debate. Here, we revisit quantum thermal machines operating with the quasi-static Carnot cycle and aim…
A thermodynamic model of a plasma boundary layer, characterized by enhanced temperature contrasts is proposed. The theory is constructed to determine the inner boundary temperature $T_1$ for a specified outer (colder) boundary temperature…