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Heat is a physical manifestation of entropy, where the removal of entropy from a thermal energy reservoir permits the conversion of heat into work. This entropy transfer is facilitated by the cold thermal energy reservoir in typical heat…
The laws of thermodynamics provide a clear concept of the temperature for an equilibrium system in the continuum limit. Meanwhile, the equipartition theorem allows one to make a connection between the ensemble average of the kinetic energy…
We discuss whether, and under which conditions, it is possible to realize a heat engine simply by dynamically modulating the couplings between the quantum working medium and thermal reservoirs. For that purpose, we consider the paradigmatic…
Modern technologies could soon make it possible to investigate the operation cycles of quantum heat engines by counting the photons that are emitted and absorbed by their working systems. Using the quantum jump approach to open-system…
The performances of quantum thermometry in thermal equilibrium together with the output power of certain class of quantum engines share a common characteristic: both are determined by the heat capacity of the probe or working medium. After…
Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…
In this paper we investigate the relationship between the efficiency of a cyclic quantum heat engine with the Hilbert space dimension of the thermal baths. By means of a general inequality, we show that the Carnot efficiency can be obtained…
In this review the debated rapport between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is addressed in the framework of the theory of periodically-driven/controlled quantum-thermodynamic machines. The basic model studied here is that of a…
We consider a class of quantum heat engines consisting of two subsystems interacting via a unitary transformation and coupled to two separate baths at different temperatures $T_h > T_c$. The purpose of the engine is to extract work due to…
The laws of thermodynamics put limits to the efficiencies of thermal machines. Analogues of these laws are now established for quantum engines weakly and passively coupled to the environment providing a framework to find improvements to…
Seemingly different interpretations or descriptions of Einstein's model for the heat capacity of a solid can be found in textbooks and the literature. The purpose of this note is to clarify the equivalence of the different descriptions,…
We construct a quantum critical Otto engine that is powered by finite temperature baths. We show that the work output of the engine shows universal power law behavior that depends on the critical exponents of the working medium, as well as…
We develop an exact quantum thermodynamic description for a noninteracting nanoscale steady state that couples strongly with multiple reservoirs. It is demonstrated that there exists a steady-state extension of the thermodynamic function…
A major limitations for many heat engines is that their functioning demands on-line control, and/or an external fitting between environmental parameters (e.g. temperatures of thermal baths) and internal parameters of the engine. We study a…
We investigate the limitations that emerge in thermodynamic tasks as a result of having local control only over the components of a thermal machine. These limitations are particularly relevant for devices composed of interacting many-body…
We derive an efficiency bound for continuous quantum heat engines absorbing heat from squeezed thermal reservoirs. Our approach relies on a full-counting statistics description of nonequilibrium transport and it is not limited to the…
Interesting effects arise in cyclic machines where both heat and ergotropy transfer take place between the energising bath and the system (the working fluid). Such effects correspond to unconventional decompositions of energy exchange…
The Carnot-like heat engines are classified into three types (normal-, sub- and super-dissipative) according to relations between the minimum irreversible entropy production in the "isothermal" processes and the time for completing those…
Power and efficiency of heat engines are two conflicting objectives, and a tight efficiency bound is expected to give insights on the fundamental properties of the power-efficiency tradeoff. Here we derive an upper bound on the efficiency…
We study nonequilibrium thermodynamics in a fermionic resonant level model with arbitrary coupling strength to a fermionic bath, taking the wide-band limit. In contrast to previous theories, we consider a system where both the level energy…