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Performance of nano- and micro-scale heat engines can be improved with a help from quantum mechanical phenomena. Recently, heat reservoirs with quantum coherence have been proposed to enhance engine performance beyond the Carnot limit even…
The near-field electromagnetic interaction between nanoscale objects produces enhanced radiative heat transfer that can greatly surpass the limits established by far-field black-body radiation. Here, we present a theoretical framework to…
The fundamentals of a quantum heat engine are derived from first principles. The study is based on the equation of motion of a minimum set of operators which is then used to define the state of the system. The relation between the quantum…
We propose a theoretical model that integrates a three-level $\Lambda$-type quantum heat engine with a vibrating nanomirror, where the connection is established via a laser field. In the presence of both hot and cold thermal photonic baths,…
Near-field thermal radiation transfer overcoming the far-field blackbody limit has attracted significant attention in recent years owing to its potential for drastically increasing the output power and conversion efficiency of…
Colloidal heat engines extract power out of a fluctuating bath by manipulating a confined tracer. Considering a self-propelled tracer surrounded by a bath of passive colloids, we optimize the engine performances based on the maximum…
Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…
Can many-body systems be beneficial to designing quantum technologies? We address this question by examining quantum engines, where recent studies indicate potential benefits through the harnessing of many-body effects, such as divergences…
The energy conversion efficiency of far-from-equilibrium systems is generally limited by irreversible thermodynamic fluxes that make contact with different heat baths. For complex systems, the states of the maximum efficiency and the…
Conventional continuous quantum heat engines with incoherent heat transfer perform poorly as they exploit two-body interactions between the system and hot or cold baths, thus having limited capability to outperform their classical…
Heat flux exchanged between two hot bodies at subwavelength separation distances can exceed the limit predicted by the blackbody theory. However this super-Planckian transfer is restricted to these separation distances. Here we demonstrate…
Heat engines cannot generally operate at maximum power and efficiency, imposing a trade-off between the two. Here, we highlight the exact nature of this trade-off for engines that exchange heat radiatively with a hot source. We derive…
Radiative heat-transport mediated by near-field interactions is known to be superdiffusive in dilute, many-body systems. In this Letter we use a generalized Landauer theory of radiative heat transfer in many-body planar systems to…
Cyclical heat engines are a paradigm of classical thermodynamics, but are impractical for miniaturization because they rely on moving parts. A more recent concept is particle-exchange (PE) heat engines, which uses energy filtering to…
By reformulating the first law of thermodynamics in the fashion of quantum-mechanical operators on the parameter manifold, we propose a universal class of quantum heat engines (QHE) using the multi-level quantum system as the working…
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…
Quantum heat engines employ as working agents multi-level systems instead of gas-filled cylinders. We consider particularly two-level agents such as electrons immersed in a magnetic field. Work is produced in that case when the electrons…
We study the thermodynamics of near-field thermal radiation between two identical polar media at different temperatures. As an application, we consider an idealized energy harvesting process from sources at near room temperature at the…
This article proposes a new energy harvesting concept that greatly enhances thermionic power generation with high e ciency by exploiting the near- field enhancement of thermal radiation. The proposed near-field enhanced thermionic energy…
The quantum-mechanical and thermodynamic properties of a 3-level molecular cooling cycle are derived. An inadequacy of earlier models is rectified in accounting for the spontaneous emission and absorption associated with the coupling to the…