Related papers: Maximum-power quantum-mechanical Carnot engine
Continuous particle exchange thermal machines require no time-dependent driving, can be realised in solid-state electronic devices, and miniaturised to nanometre scale. Quantum dots, providing a narrow energy filter and allowing to…
We determine the statistics of work in isothermal volume changes of a classical ideal gas consisting of a single particle. Combining our results with the findings of Lua and Grosberg [J. Chem. Phys. B 109, 6805 (2005)] on adiabatic…
A cyclically operating chemical engine is considered that converts chemical energy into mechanical work. The working fluid is a gas of finite-sized spherical particles interacting through elastic hard collisions. For a generic transport law…
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…
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…
We investigate stochastic thermodynamics of a two-particles Langevin system. Each particle is in contact with a heat bath at different temperatures $T_1$ and $T_2~(<T_1)$, respectively. Particles are trapped by a harmonic potential and…
Sum rules have played an important role in the development of many branches of physics since the earliest days of quantum mechanics. We present examples of one-dimensional quantum mechanical sum rules and apply them in two familiar systems,…
It is known that an engine with ideal efficiency ($\eta =1$ for a chemical engine and $e = e_{\rm Carnot}$ for a thermal one) has zero power because a reversible cycle takes an infinite time. However, at least from a theoretical point of…
We explore the dependence of the performance bounds of heat engines and refrigerators on the initial quantum state and the subsequent evolution of their piston, modeled by a quantized harmonic oscillator. Our goal is to provide a fully…
We show theoretically that a thermoelectric heat engine, operating exclusively due to quantum-mechanical interference, can reach optimal linear-response performance. A chiral edge state implementation of a close-to-optimal heat engine is…
Thermodynamics imposes restrictions on what state transformations are possible. In the macroscopic limit of asymptotically many independent copies of a state---as for instance in the case of an ideal gas---the possible transformations…
Various quantum systems are considered as the working substance for the analysis of quantum heat cycles and quantum refrigerators. The ongoing technological challenge is how efficiently can a heat engine convert thermal energy to mechanical…
We proposed the finite-time cycle model of a measurement-based quantum cooler, where invasive measurement provides the power to drive the cooling cycle. Such a cooler may be regarded as an alternative thought experiment of Mawell's demon.…
A new family of 2-component vector-valued coherent states for the quantum particle motion in an infinite square well potential is presented. They allow a consistent quantization of the classical phase space and observables for a particle in…
From a careful study of the transcendental equations fulfilled by the bound state energies of a free particle in a quantum well, cylindrical wire or spherical dot with finite potential barrier, we have derived analytical expressions of…
We propose a scheme for a single-atom quantum heat engine based on ultra-cold atom technologies. Building on the high degree of control typical of cold atom systems, we demonstrate that three paradigmatic heat engines -- Carnot, Otto and…
The problem of extracting the work from a quantum-thermodynamic system driven by slowly varying external parameters is discussed. It is shown that there naturally emerges a gauge-theoretic structure. The field strength identically vanishes…
Mesoscopic thermoelectric heat engine is much anticipated as a device that allows us to utilize with high efficiency wasted heat inaccessible by conventional heat engines. However, the derivation of the heat current in this engine seems to…
The double well potential is arguably one of the most important potentials in quantum mechanics, because the solution contains the notion of a state as a linear superposition of `classical' states, a concept which has become very important…
A chart for the quantum mechanics of a particle of mass $m$ in a one-dimensional potential well of width $w$ and depth $V_0$ is derived. The chart is obtained by normalizing energy and potential through multiplication by ${8 m}{w^2} / h^2$,…