Related papers: A Micrometer-sized Heat Engine Operating Between B…

Micromotors pushed by biological entities, like motile bacteria, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. Here we show, by using numerical simulations, that a properly designed…

Stochastic heat engines are devices that generate work from random thermal motion using a small number of highly fluctuating degrees of freedom. Proposals for such devices have existed for more than a century and include the Maxwell demon…

Quantum thermal machines make use of non-classical thermodynamic resources, one of which is interactions between elements of the quantum working medium. In this paper, we examine the performance of a quasi-static quantum Otto engine based…

We study the thermodynamic performance of the finite-time non-regenerative Stirling cycle used as a quantum heat engine. We consider specifically the case in which the working substance (WS) is a two-level system. The Stirling cycle is made…

Designing a miniature microscale engine that can override the role of thermal fluctuations has remained elusive and is an important open challenge. Here we provide the design and theoretical framework for a unique information-based engine -…

We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…

The stochastic efficiency [G. Verley et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 4721 (2014)] was introduced to evaluate the performance of energy-conversion machines in micro-scale. However, such an efficiency generally diverges when no heat is absorbed while…

We investigate the heat transport between two nonthermal reservoirs based on a microscopic collision model. We consider a bipartite system consisting of two identical subsystems, and each subsystem interacts with its own local reservoir,…

We propose a minimal model aiming to describe heat transfer between particles (i.e. grains) and gases in a model of flighted rotary kilns. It considers a channel in which a convective gas interacts with a granular suspension and a granular…

Hydrodynamic flows are often generated in colloidal suspensions. Since colloidal particles are frequently used to construct stochastic heat engines, we study how the hydrodynamic flows influence the output parameters of the engine. We study…

We investigate the thermodynamics and fluctuations of a finite-time quantum Otto engine alternatively driven by a hot squeezed and a cold thermal reservoir. We show that reservoir squeezing significantly enhances the performance by…

The performance in finite time of a discrete heat engine with internal friction is analyzed. The working fluid of the engine is composed of an ensemble of noninteracting two level systems. External work is applied by changing the external…

We study a quantum Stirling cycle which extracts work using quantized energy levels of a potential well. The work and the efficiency of the engine depend on the length of the potential well, and the Carnot efficiency is approached in a low…

A heat engine is a machine which uses the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir to extract work. Here both reservoirs are quantum systems and a heat engine is described by a unitary transformation which decreases the…

For cyclic heat engines operating in a finite cycle period, thermodynamic quantities have intercycle and intracycle correlations. By tuning the driving protocol appropriately, we can get the negative intercycle correlation to reduce the…

The hallmark of active matter is the autonomous directed motion of its microscopic constituents driven by consumption of energy resources. This leads to the emergence of large scale dynamics and structures without any equilibrium…

We study temperature fluctuations in mesoscopic $N$-body systems undergoing non-equilibrium processes from the perspective of stochastic thermodynamics. By introducing a stochastic differential equation, we describe the evolution of the…

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…

Stochastic thermodynamics as reviewed here systematically provides a framework for extending the notions of classical thermodynamics like work, heat and entropy production to the level of individual trajectories of well-defined…

We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…