Related papers: The Broken Engine of Szilard
Artificial micro heat engines are prototypical models to explore and elucidate the mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1-2]. Micro heat engines realized hitherto mimicked their macroscopic…
Athermal (i.e. zero-temperature) under-constrained systems are typically floppy, but they can be rigidified by the application of external strain, which is theoretically well understood. Here and in the companion paper, we extend this…
We consider a one-dimensional system consisting of two infinite ideal fluids, with equal pressures but different temperatures T_1 and T_2, separated by an adiabatic movable piston whose mass M is much larger than the mass m of the fluid…
Nanoscale machines are strongly influenced by thermal fluctuations, contrary to their macroscopic counterparts. As a consequence, even the efficiency of such microscopic machines becomes a fluctuating random variable. Using geometric…
The equilibrium conditions of a system consisting of a box with gas divided by a piston are revised. The apparent indetermination of the problem is solved by explicitly imposing the constancy of the internal energy when the Entropy Maximum…
The dynamics along the particle trajectories for the 3D axisymmetric Euler equations in an infinite cylinder are considered. It is shown that if the inflow-outflow is rapidly increasing in time, the corresponding laminar profile of the…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
Heat engines provide most of our mechanical power and are essential for transportation on macroscopic scale. However, although significant progress has been made in the miniaturization of electrostatic engines, it has proven difficult to…
We investigate fluctuations of output work for a class of Stirling heat engines with working fluid composed of interacting units and compare these fluctuations to an average work output. In particular, we focus on engine performance close…
We have investigated the dynamics of superfluid phase slippage in an array of apertures. The magnitude of the dissipative phase slips shows that they occur simultaneously in all the apertures when the temperature is around 10 mK below the…
We introduce a deterministic chaotic system---the Szilard Map---that encapsulates the measurement, control, and erasure protocol by which Maxwellian Demons extract work from a heat reservoir. Implementing the Demon's control function in a…
We study the evolution of the energy gap in a unitary Fermi gas as a function of temperature. To this end we approximate the Fermi gas by the Hubbard lattice Hamiltonian and solve using the dynamical mean-field approximation. We have found…
Quantifying the flow of energy within and through fluctuating nanoscale systems poses a significant challenge to understanding microscopic biological machines. A common approach involves coarse-graining, which allows a simplified…
The features for the unsteady process of thermal equilibration ("the fast motions") in a one-dimensional harmonic crystal lying in a viscous environment (e.g., a gas) are under investigation. It is assumed that initially the displacements…
The so-called information-thermodynamics link created by a thought experiment of Szilard became a core of the modern orthodoxy in the field of quantum information and resources theory in quantum thermodynamics. We remind existing objections…
The most succinct manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics is the limitation the Landauer principle imposes on the amount of heat a Maxwell demon (MD) can convert into free energy per single bit of information obtained in a…
It is known that an engine with ideal efficiency ($\eta =1$ for a chemical engine and $e = e_{\rm Carnot}$ for a thermal one) has zero power because a reversible cycle takes an infinite time. However, at least from a theoretical point of…
The piston system (particles in a box) is the simplest and paradigmatic model in traditional thermodynamics. However, the recently established framework of stochastic thermodynamics (ST) fails to apply to this model system due to the…
Using the fluctuation theorem supplemented with geometric arguments, we derive universal features of the (long-time) efficiency fluctuations for thermal and isothermal machines operating under steady or periodic driving, close or far from…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…