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We establish a finite-time quantum tricycle driven by an external field and investigate its thermodynamic performance in the slow-driving regime. By developing a perturbative expansion of heat with respect to operation time, we capture the…
Periodically driven coherent conductors provide a universal platform for the development of quantum transport devices. Here, we lay down a comprehensive theory to describe the thermodynamics of these systems. We first focus on moderate…
We investigate the non-equilibrium compression of a confined hard-sphere colloidal fluid driven by a mobile boundary within dynamical density functional theory. The system consists of a fluid confined between two parallel walls, one acting…
Thermodynamics of small systems has become an important field of statistical physics. They are driven out of equilibrium by a control, and the question is naturally posed how such a control can be optimized. We show that optimization…
Quantifying energy flows at nanometer scales promises to guide future research in a variety of disciplines, from microscopic control and manipulation, to autonomously operating molecular machines. A general understanding of the…
We investigate the thermodynamics of overdamped systems weakly driven by time-dependent protocols while interacting with viscoelastic heat baths. Using a generalized Langevin equation with memory, we derive the conditions under which the…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
The least action principle is exploited as a simulation tool to find the optimal dynamic path for spatially extended systems driven by a small noise. Applications are presented for thermally activated switching of a spatially-extended…
In contrast to the classical concept of a Carnot engine that alternates contact between heat baths of different temperatures, naturally occurring processes usually harvest energy from anisotropy, being exposed simultaneously to chemical and…
Protein folding processes are generally described statistically with the help of multidimensional free energy landscape, typically reduced to a 1-D free energy profile along good reaction co-ordinate. There are many physical parameters…
Optimal transport theory, originally developed in the 18th century for civil engineering, has since become a powerful optimization framework across disciplines, from generative AI to cell biology. In physics, it has recently been shown to…
The thermodynamics of mesoscopic systems driven by time-varying temperatures is crucial for understanding biological systems, designing nanoscale engines, and performing micro-particle cooling. In this work, we analyze an underdamped…
A thermodynamic model of a plasma boundary layer, characterized by enhanced temperature contrasts is proposed. The theory is constructed to determine the inner boundary temperature $T_1$ for a specified outer (colder) boundary temperature…
Many processes in chemistry, physics, and biology involve rare events in which the system escapes from a metastable state by surmounting an activation barrier. Examples range from chemical reactions, protein folding, and nucleation events…
We propose a reformulation of the problem of optimally controlled transitions in stochastic thermodynamics. We impose that any terminal cost specified by a thermodynamic functional should depend only on state variables and not on control…
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…
In this work we explore the use of thermodynamic length to improve the performance of experimental protocols. In particular, we implement Landauer erasure on a driven electron level in a semiconductor quantum dot, and compare the standard…
The development of efficient artificial nanodevices poses challenges which are of fundamental and technological nature. Recent progress has been made in the context of finite-time thermodynamics. A central question in finite-time…
When engineering microscopic machines, increasing efficiency can often come at a price of reduced reliability due to the impact of stochastic fluctuations. Here we develop a general method for performing multi-objective optimisation of…
A diffuse-interface model for microstructure with an arbitrary number of components and phases was developed from basic thermodynamic and kinetic principles and formalized within a variational framework. The model includes a composition…