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Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…
Diverse models of engines energised by quantum-coherent, hence non-thermal, baths allow the engine efficiency to transgress the standard thermodynamic Carnot bound. These transgressions call for an elucidation of the underlying mechanisms.…
We derive a bound on the efficiency of thermal engines that can be sharper than Carnot's limit. It is a function of statistical correlations between the engine internal state and Hamiltonian, can be saturated even in finite-time cycles, and…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
The efficient conversion of thermal energy to mechanical work by a heat engine is an ongoing technological challenge. Since the pioneering work of Carnot, it is known that the efficiency of heat engines is bounded by a fundamental upper…
We investigate, in an analytical fashion, quantum Carnot cycles of a microscopic heat engine coupled to two nite heat reservoirs, whose internal cycles could own higher e ciency than the standard Carnot limit without consuming extra quantum…
We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…
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 dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
Sadi Carnot's theorem regarding the maximum efficiency of heat engines is considered to be of fundamental importance in thermodynamics. This theorem famously states that the maximum efficiency depends only on the temperature of the heat…
Conversations about weather, environment, health, cuisine, and even politics, all involve the word "temperature". It was an attempt to understand the working of heat engines that gave the temperature a clear definition. In this Note we put…
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''.…
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics has shown its applicability in a wide variety of different situations pertaining to fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. As successful as it is, however, its current formulation…
We show that a Carnot cycle operating between a positive canonical-temperature bath and a negative canonical-temperature bath has efficiency equal to unity. It follows that a negative canonical-temperature cannot be identified with an…
The efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound. This bound follows from the second law of thermodynamics and is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the…
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.
According to Thermodynamics, the efficiency of a heat engine is upper bounded by Carnot efficiency. For macroscopic systems, the Carnot efficiency is, however, achieved only for quasi static processes. And, considerable attention has been…
Development of steady state thermodynamics and statistical mechanics depends crucially on our ability to develop notions of equilibrium thermodynamics for nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). The present paper considers the development of…
Measuring the local temperature of nanoscale systems out of equilibrium has emerged as a new tool to study local heating effects and other local thermal properties of systems driven by external fields. Although various experimental…
The consistent definition of the thermodynamic functions of small open quantum systems in contact with an environment in equilibrium with a heat bath has been the subject of many debates in the quantum community. In the present work we…