Related papers: Maximizing free energy gain
We consider a foundational question in energy harvesting: given a partly random energy source, is it possible to extract the energy without also transferring randomness or accepting another thermodynamical cost? We answer this in the…
Scientific discovery can be framed as a thermodynamic process in which an agent invests physical work to acquire information about an environment under a finite work budget. Using established results about the thermodynamics of computing,…
Thermodynamic selection is an indirect competition between agents feeding on the same energy resource and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. We examine scenarios of this selection, where the agent is modeled as a heat-engine coupled to two…
We address the problem where a mobile search agent seeks to find an unknown number of stationary objects distributed in a bounded search domain, and the search mission is subject to time/distance constraint. Our work accounts for false…
Optimization analyses of thermoelectric generators operation is of importance both for practical applications and theoretical considerations. Depending on the desired goal, two different strategies are possible to achieve high performance:…
Quantum technologies are developing powerful tools to generate and manipulate coherent superpositions of different energy levels. Envisaging a new generation of energy-efficient quantum devices, here we explore how coherence can be…
The difficulty of modeling energy consumption in communication systems leads to challenges in energy harvesting (EH) systems, in which nodes scavenge energy from their environment. An EH receiver must harvest enough energy for demodulating…
Despite the increasing interest, the research field which studies the concepts of work and heat at quantum level has suffered from two main drawbacks: first, the difficulty to properly define and measure the work, heat and internal energy…
We present a critical examination of the difficulties with the quantum versions of a lifted weight that are widely used as work storage systems in quantum thermodynamics. To overcome those difficulties, we turn to the strong connections…
This article provides a review of recent developments in the formulation and execution of optimal control strategies for the dynamics of quantum systems. A brief introduction to the concept of optimal control, the dynamics of of open…
A key concept in quantum thermodynamics is extractable work, which specifies the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum system. Different quantities are used to measure extractable work, the most prevalent of which are…
Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…
Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal…
We consider the efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the environment by the growth of a copolymer made of two constituent units in the entropy-driven regime. We show that the thermodynamic nonlinearity associated with the…
We consider the optimal packet scheduling problem in a single-user energy harvesting wireless communication system. In this system, both the data packets and the harvested energy are modeled to arrive at the source node randomly. Our goal…
We investigate how the presence of quantum correlations can influence work extraction in closed quantum systems, establishing a new link between the field of quantum non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the one of quantum information theory.…
Energy harvesting (EH) has been developed to extend the lifetimes of energy-limited communication systems. In this letter, we consider a single-user EH communication system, in which both of the arrival data and the harvested energy curves…
New exact results about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of open quantum systems at arbitrary timescales are obtained by considering all possible variations of initial conditions of a system, its environment, and correlations between them.…
Ease of miniaturization and minimal maintenance are among the advantages for replacing conventional batteries with vibratory energy harvesters in a wide of range of disciplines and applications, from wireless communication sensors to…
Organisms are nonequilibrium, stationary systems self-organized via spontaneous symmetry breaking and undergoing metabolic cycles with broken detailed balance in the environment. The thermodynamic free-energy principle describes an…