Related papers: Efficiency at optimal work from finite reservoirs:…
When engineering microscopic machines, increasing efficiency can often come at a price of reduced reliability due to the impact of stochastic fluctuations. Here we develop a general method for performing multi-objective optimisation of…
Chemical processes in closed systems are poorly controllable since they always relax to equilibrium. Living systems avoid this fate and give rise to a much richer diversity of phenomena by operating under nonequilibrium conditions. Recent…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
Geothermal field modeling is often associated with uncertainties related to the subsurface static properties and the dynamics of fluid flow and heat transfer. Uncertainty quantification using simulations is a useful tool to design optimum…
We present quantitative relations between work and information that are valid both for finite sized and internally correlated systems as well in the thermodynamical limit. We suggest work extraction should be viewed as a game where the…
Efficient thermoelectric materials are highly desirable, and the quest for finding them has intensified as they could be promising alternatives to fossil energy sources. Here we present a general first-principles approach to predict, in…
In the standard framework of thermodynamics the work produced or consumed in a process is a random variable whose average value is bounded by the change in the free energy of the system. This work is calculated without regard for the size…
We consider heat fluctuations and fluctuation theorems for systems driven by multiple reservoirs. We establish a fundamental symmetry obeyed by the joint probability distribution for the heat transfers and system coordinates. The symmetry…
Aiming to explore physical limits of wind turbines, we develop a model for determining the work extractable from a compressible fluid flow. The model employs conservation of mass, energy and entropy and leads to a universal bound for the…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
In many textbooks of thermodynamics, the polytropic process is usually introduced by defining its process equation rather than analyzing its actual origin. We realize a polytropic process of an ideal gas system when it is thermally contact…
We derive the statistics of the efficiency under the assumption that thermodynamic fluxes fluctuate with normal law, parametrizing it in terms of time, macroscopic efficiency, and a coupling parameter $\zeta$. It has a peculiar behavior: No…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
Predicting future observations plays a central role in machine learning, biology, economics, and many other fields. It lies at the heart of organizational principles such as the variational free energy principle and has even been shown --…
Constructing optimal thermodynamic processes in quantum systems relies on managing the balance between the average excess work and its stochastic fluctuations. Recently it has been shown that two different quantum generalisations of…
We derive the bias function that minimizes the statistical error of free energy differences calculated in work-biased fast-switching simulations. The optimum bias function is compared to other bias functions using a particle pulled through…
The widely debated feasibility of thermodynamic machines achieving Carnot efficiency at finite power has been convincingly dismissed. Yet, the common wisdom that efficiency can only be optimal in the limit of infinitely-slow processes…
A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
Power and efficiency are fundamental criteria for evaluating the performance of thermodynamic cycles. However, it is generally impossible to maximize both simultaneously. In particular, achieving maximum efficiency inevitably leads to…