Related papers: Maximum Efficiency of Low-Dissipation Heat Engines…
We consider a three-stroke engine in the microscopic regime, where the working body of the engine is composed of a two-level system. The working body of the engine aims to withdraw heat from the hot heat bath, generate work, and discharge…
We optimize finite-time stochastic heat engines with a periodically scaled Hamiltonian under experimentally motivated constraints on the bath temperature $T$ and the scaling parameter $\lambda$. We present a general geometric proof that…
Based on a quantum thermodynamic protocol for shortcut to isothermality that smoothly modify the system-reservoir interaction can significantly speed up an isothermal process while keeping the overall dissipation constant [Phys. Rev. X. 10,…
Work extraction from a heat engine in a cycle by a quantum mechanical device (quantum "piston") is analyzed. The standard definition of work fails in the quantum domain. The correct extractable work and its efficiency bound are shown to…
We study the optimization of the performance of arbitrary periodically driven thermal machines. Within the assumption of fast modulation of the driving parameters, we derive the optimal cycle that universally maximizes the extracted power…
Machines are only Carnot efficient if they are reversible, but then their power output is vanishingly small. Here we ask, what is the maximum efficiency of an irreversible device with finite power output? We use a nonlinear scattering…
Modern technologies could soon make it possible to investigate the operation cycles of quantum heat engines by counting the photons that are emitted and absorbed by their working systems. Using the quantum jump approach to open-system…
We study the statistics of the efficiency in a class of isothermal cyclic machines with realistic coupling between the internal degrees of freedom. We derive, under fairly general assumptions, the probability distribution function for the…
We study thermodynamic processes in contact with a heat bath that may have an arbitrary time-varying periodic temperature profile. Within the framework of stochastic thermodynamics, and for models of thermo-dynamic engines in the idealized…
A long standing open problem whether a heat engine with finite power achieves the Carnot efficiency is investigated. We rigorously prove a general trade-off inequality on thermodynamic efficiency and time interval of a cyclic process with…
Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…
We introduce heat engines working in the nano-regime that allow to extract a finite amount of deterministic work. We show that the efficiency of these cycles is strictly smaller than Carnot's, and we associate this difference with a…
We formulate the power-efficiency constraint of Carnot-like heat engines as a geometric optimization problem in the plane of normalized branch dissipations. Efficiency contours are straight lines in this plane, so maximizing efficiency at…
Reducing work fluctuation and dissipation in heat engines or, more generally, information heat engines that perform feedback control is vital to maximize their efficiency. The same problem arises when we attempt to maximize the efficiency…
Achieving the Carnot efficiency at finite power is a challenging problem in heat engines due to the trade-off relation between efficiency and power that holds for general heat engines. It is pointed out that the Carnot efficiency at finite…
The maximum power of Feynman's ratchet as a heat engine and the corresponding efficiency ($\eta_\ast$) are investigated by optimizing both the internal parameter and the external load. When a perfect ratchet device (no heat exchange between…
The possibility of utilizing quantum effects to enhance the performance of quantum heat engines has been an active topic of research, but how to enhance the performance by optimizing the engine parameters needs to be further studied. In…
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…
Heat engines used to output useful work have important practical significance, which, in general, operate between heat baths of infinite size and constant temperature. In this paper we study the efficiency of a heat engine operating between…
Molecular motors transduce chemical energy obtained from hydrolizing ATP into mechanical work exerted against an external force. We calculate their efficiency at maximum power output for two simple generic models and show that the…