Related papers: Efficiency at optimal work from finite reservoirs:…
The tradeoff relation between speed and cost is a central issue in designing fast and efficient information processing devices. We derive an achievable bound on thermodynamic cost for obtaining information through finite-time…
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…
We show that work can be extracted from a two-level system (spin) coupled to a bosonic thermal bath. This is possible due to different initial temperatures of the spin and the bath, both positive (no spin population inversion) and is…
Time-integrated quantities such as work and heat increase incessantly in time during nonequilibrium processes near steady states. In the long-time limit, the average values of work and heat become asymptotically equivalent to each other,…
We show that the maximum work that can be obtained from the thermal radiation emitted between two planar sources in the near-field regime is much larger than that corresponding to the blackbody limit. This quantity as well as an upper bound…
In this note, the equilibrium curve of a thermodynamic system is used to depict entropy production in the process of thermalization with a reservoir. For the given initial and final equilibrium states of the system, the entropy production…
The concepts of weighted reciprocal of temperature and weighted thermal flux are proposed for a heat engine operating between two heat baths and outputting mechanical work. With the aid of these two concepts, the generalized thermodynamic…
We analytically derive universal bounds that describe the trade-off between thermodynamic cost and precision in a sequence of events related to some internal changes of an otherwise hidden physical system. The precision is quantified by the…
We study the statistics of the efficiency in a class of isothermal cyclic machines with realistic coupling between the internal degrees of freedom. We derive, under fairly general assumptions, the probability distribution function for the…
The development of efficient artificial nanodevices poses challenges which are of fundamental and technological nature. Recent progress has been made in the context of finite-time thermodynamics. A central question in finite-time…
The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…
In this work, we propose a theory of temperature estimation of quantum systems, which is applicable in the regime of non-negligible prior temperature uncertainty and limited measurement data. In this regime the problem of establishing a…
The Brown-Resnick max-stable process has proven to be well-suited for modeling extremes of complex environmental processes, but in many applications its likelihood function is intractable and inference must be based on a composite…
The method of maximum entropy (ME) is extended to address the following problem: Once one accepts that the ME distribution is to be preferred over all others, the question is to what extent are distributions with lower entropy supposed to…
Scientific discovery can be framed as a thermodynamic process in which an agent invests physical work to acquire information about an environment under a finite work budget. Using established results about the thermodynamics of computing,…
We consider quantum heat engines that operate between nonequilibrium stationary reservoirs. We evaluate their maximum efficiency from the positivity of the entropy production and show that it can be expressed in terms of an effective…
A novel formalism, called H-theory, is applied to the problem of statistical equilibrium of a hierarchical complex system with multiple time and length scales. In this approach, the system is formally treated as being composed of a small…
We review theoretical approaches to analyzing efficiency of steady state heat to work conversion which is crucial in the timely problem of optimizing efficiency of small-scale heat engines and refrigerators. A rather abstract perspective of…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
We analyze the entropy production and the maximal extractable work from a squeezed thermal reservoir. The nonequilibrium quantum nature of the reservoir induces an entropy transfer with a coherent contribution while modifying its thermal…