Related papers: Thermally Driven Elastic Micromachines
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
Evaluating the linear response of a driven system to a change in environment temperature(s) is essential for understanding thermal properties of nonequilibrium systems. The system is kept in weak contact with possibly different fast…
We present a theoretical investigation of thermal fluctuation statistics in a molecular motor. Energy transfer in the motor is described using a multidimensional discrete master equation with nearest-neighbor hopping. In this theory, energy…
We show that, in nonequilibrium systems with small heat flows, there is a time-scale dependent effective temperature which plays the same role as the thermodynamical temperature, in that it controls the direction of heat flows and acts as a…
Theoretical analysis, which maps single molecule time trajectories of a molecular motor onto unicyclic Markov processes, allows us to evaluate the heat dissipated from the motor and to elucidate its dependence on the mean velocity and…
The main physical features and operating principles of isothermal nanomachines in microworld are reviewed, which are common for both classical and quantum machines. Especial attention is paid to the dual and constructive role of dissipation…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…
We investigate a simplified model of two fully connected magnetic systems maintained at different temperatures by virtue of being connected to two independent thermal baths while simultaneously being inter-connected with each other. Using…
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
Out of thermal equilibrium, an environment imposes effective mechanical forces on microscopical nanofabricated devices, chemical or biological systems. Here we address the question of how to calculate these forces together with the response…
We propose a scheme for a quantum thermal machine made by atoms interacting with a single non-equilibrium electromagnetic field. The field is produced by a simple configuration of macroscopic objects held at thermal equilibrium at different…
Recent theoretical advances have led to the creation of a unified phase diagram for the thermal glass and athermal jamming transitions. This diagram makes clear that, while related, the mode-coupling---or dynamic---glass transition is…
We study the speed of fluctuation of a quantum system around its thermodynamic equilibrium state, and show that the speed will be extremely small for almost all times in typical thermodynamic cases. The setting considered here is that of a…
Microscopic thermal machines promise to play an important role in future quantum technologies. Making such devices widely applicable will require effective strategies to channel their output into easily accessible storage systems like…
We introduce a new class of mesoscopic heat engines consisting of a tunnel junction coupled to a linear thermal bath. Work is produced by transporting electrons up against a voltage bias like in ordinary thermoelectrics but heat is…
Einstein realised that the fluctuations of a Brownian particle can be used to ascertain properties of its environment. A large number of experiments have since exploited the Brownian motion of colloidal particles for studies of dissipative…
Microscopic heat engines are microscale systems that convert energy flows between heat reservoirs into work or systematic motion. We have experimentally realized a minimal microscopic heat engine. It consists of a colloidal Brownian…
We develop a theory of the effective disorder temperature in glass-forming materials driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by external forces. Our basic premise is that the slow configurational degrees of freedom of such materials are…
In this article we discuss several aspects of the stochastic dynamics of spin models. The paper has two independent parts. Firstly, we explore a few properties of the multi-point correlations and responses of generic systems evolving in…
Small nonequilibrium systems in contact with a heat bath can be analyzed with the framework of stochastic thermodynamics. In such systems, fluctuations, which are not negligible, follow universal relations such as the fluctuation theorem.…