Related papers: Incompatibility between Carnot efficiency and fini…
Several recent theories address the efficiency of a macroscopic thermodynamic motor at maximum power and question the so-called "Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency." Considering the entropy exchanges and productions in an n-sources motor, we…
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…
Diverse models of engines energised by quantum-coherent, hence non-thermal, baths allow the engine efficiency to transgress the standard thermodynamic Carnot bound. These transgressions call for an elucidation of the underlying mechanisms.…
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…
We derive an efficiency bound for continuous quantum heat engines absorbing heat from squeezed thermal reservoirs. Our approach relies on a full-counting statistics description of nonequilibrium transport and it is not limited to the…
The standard dynamical approach to quantum thermodynamics is based on Markovian master equations describing the thermalization of a system weakly coupled to a large environment, and on tools such as entropy production relations. Here we…
In the present paper, we study the power output and efficiency of overdamped stochastic thermodynamic engines that are in contact with a heat bath having a temperature that varies periodically with time. This is in contrast to most of the…
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…
Whether the strong coupling to thermal baths can improve the performance of quantum thermal machines remains an open issue under active debate. Here, we revisit quantum thermal machines operating with the quasi-static Carnot cycle and aim…
There is a relation between the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes as expressed by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, and the entropy production in such processes. We explain on an elementary mathematical level the relations…
We present a self contained formalism modelled after the Brownian motion of a quantum harmonic oscillator for describing the performance of microscopic Brownian heat engines like Carnot, Stirling and Otto engines. Our theory, besides…
We construct a generic model for a heat engine using information theory concepts, attributing irreversible energy dissipation to the information transmission channels. Using several forms for the channel capacity, classical and quantum, we…
A rapid restoration of the bath state is usually required to induce Markovian dynamics for an open quantum system, which typically can be realized only in limits such as weak system-bath coupling and infinitely large bath. In this work, we…
Stability is an important property of small thermal machines with fluctuating power output. We here consider a finite-time quantum Carnot engine based on a degenerate multilevel system and study the influence of its finite Hilbert space…
The nonequilibrium thermodynamics feature of a Brownian motor is investigated by obtaining exact time-dependent solutions. This in turn enables us to investigate not only the long time property (steady-state) but also the short time the…
[...] By the beginning of the 20th century, the principles of thermodynamics were summarized into the so-called four laws, which were, as it turns out, definitive negative answers to the doomed quests for perpetual motion machines. As a…
We study the efficiency at maximum power, $\eta_m$, of irreversible quantum Carnot engines (QCEs) that perform finite-time cycles between a hot and a cold reservoir at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively. For QCEs in the reversible…
We introduce a general framework for analyzing the thermodynamics of small systems that are driven by both a periodic temperature variation and some external parameter modulating their energy. This set-up covers, in particular, periodic…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
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…