Related papers: Comment on "Nanoscale Heat Engine Beyond the Carno…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
A long standing open problem whether a heat engine with finite power achieves the Carnot efficiency is investigated. We rigorously prove a general trade-off inequality on thermodynamic efficiency and time interval of a cyclic process with…
In the present paper, we study the power output and efficiency of overdamped stochastic thermodynamic engines that are in contact with a heat bath having a temperature that varies periodically with time. This is in contrast to most of the…
A heat engine operating in the one-shot finite-size regime, where systems composed of a small number of quantum particles interact with hot and cold baths and are restricted to one-shot measurements, delivers fluctuating work. Further,…
Carnot's theorem poses a fundamental limit on the maximum efficiency achievable from an engine that works between two reservoirs at thermal equilibrium. We extend this result to the case of arbitrary nonthermal stationary reservoirs, even…
We present a consistent thermodynamic theory for the resonant level model in the wide band limit, whose level energy is driven slowly by an external force. The problem of defining 'system' and 'bath' in the strong coupling regime is…
The context of the present paper is stochastic thermodynamics - an approach to nonequilibrium thermodynamics rooted within the broader framework of stochastic control. In contrast to the classical paradigm of Carnot engines, we herein…
Quantum thermodynamics is an emerging research field aiming to extend standard thermodynamics and non-equilibrium statistical physics to ensembles of sizes well below the thermodynamic limit, in non-equilibrium situations, and with the full…
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…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
The Carnot heat engine sets an upper bound on the efficiency of a heat engine. As an ideal, reversible engine, a single cycle must be performed in infinite time, and so the Carnot engine has zero power. However, there is nothing in…
Starting from a master equation in a quantum Hamilton form we study analytically a nonequilibrium system which is coupled locally to two heat bathes at different temperatures. Based on a lattice gas description an evolution equation for the…
Heat capacities of model systems with finite numbers of effective degrees of freedom are evaluated using canonical and microcanonical thermodynamics. Discrepancies between both approaches, which are observed even in the infinite-size limit,…
The Carnot cycle imposes a fundamental upper limit to the efficiency of a macroscopic motor operating between two thermal baths. However, this bound needs to be reinterpreted at microscopic scales, where molecular bio-motors and some…
In systems described by the scattering theory, there is an upper bound, lower than Carnot, on the efficiency of steady-state heat to work conversion at a given output power. We show that interacting systems can overcome such bound and…
We analyze the performance of slowly driven meso- and micro-scale refrigerators and heat engines that operate between two thermal baths with small temperature difference. Using a general scaling argument, we show that such devices can work…
We show how to extend the concept of heat capacity to nonequilibrium systems. The main idea is to consider the excess heat released by an already dissipative system when slowly changing the environment temperature. We take the framework of…
For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…
Heat engines constitute the major building blocks of modern technologies. However, conventional heat engines with higher power yield lesser efficiency and vice versa and respect various power-efficiency trade-off relations. This is also…
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…