Related papers: When is a quantum heat engine quantum?
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…
The working substance fueling a quantum heat engine may contain coherence in its energy basis, depending on the dynamics of the engine cycle. In some models of quantum Otto heat engines, energy coherence has been associated with entropy…
We introduce a quantum heat engine performing an Otto cycle by using the thermal properties of the quantum vacuum. Since Hawking and Unruh, it has been established that the vacuum space, either near a black hole or for an accelerated…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…
The thermodynamic properties of quantum heat engines are stochastic owing to the presence of thermal and quantum fluctuations. We here experimentally investigate the efficiency and nonequilibrium entropy production statistics of a spin-1/2…
In this paper, we consider a quantum Otto cycle with a quantum harmonic oscillator on a circle as its working substance. Since the eigen-energies of this oscillator depend on the curvature of the circle, this model, as an analog model,…
Quantum thermodynamics explores novel thermodynamic phenomena that emerge when interactions between macroscopic systems and microscopic quantum ones go into action. Among various issues, quantum heat engines, in particular, have attracted…
Continuous particle exchange thermal machines require no time-dependent driving, can be realised in solid-state electronic devices, and miniaturised to nanometre scale. Quantum dots, providing a narrow energy filter and allowing to…
Quantum thermodynamics is an emerging research field aiming to extend standard thermodynamics and non-equilibrium statistical physics to ensembles of sizes well below the thermodynamic limit, in non-equilibrium situations, and with the full…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
A cyclic thermodynamic heat engine runs most efficiently if it is reversible. Carnot constructed such a reversible heat engine by combining adiabatic and isothermal processes for a system containing an ideal gas. Here, we present an example…
A quantum Otto heat engine is studied with multilevel identical particles trapped in one-dimensional box potential as working substance. The symmetrical wave function for Bosons and the anti-symmetrical wave function for Fermions are…
We present a detailed thermodynamic analysis of a three-level quantum heat engine coupled continuously to hot and cold reservoirs. The system is driven by an oscillating external field and is described by the Markovian quantum master…
Quantum heat engines are subjected to quantum fluctuations related to their discrete energy spectra. Such fluctuations question the reliable operation of quantum engines in the microscopic realm. We here realize an endoreversible quantum…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
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 perform a detailed analysis of the nonclassical properties of a damped two-level system. We compute and compare three different criteria of quantumness, the $l_1$-norm of coherence, the Leggett- Garg inequality and a quantum witness…
We study a four-stroke Otto engine whose working fluid is a quantum Ising chain. The thermodynamic cycle consists in sweeps of the transverse magnetic field occurring in thermal isolation, alternated by thermalisation strokes with…
Steady-state quantum thermal machines are typically characterized by a continuous flow of heat between different reservoirs. However, at the level of discrete stochastic realizations, heat flow is unraveled as a series of abrupt quantum…