Related papers: Thermally Driven Elastic Micromachines
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
Lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides a…
The thermoelectric transport through a molecular bridge is discussed, with an emphasis on the effects of inelastic processes of the transport electrons caused by the coupling to the vibrational modes of the molecule. In particular it is…
We introduce and analyze a class of heat engines composed of interacting units, in which the thermal reservoir is associated with the neighborhood surrounding each unit. These systems can be mapped onto stochastic opinion models and are…
Adding activity or driving to a thermal system may modify its phase diagram and response functions. We study that effect for a Curie-Weiss model where the thermal bath switches rapidly between two temperatures. The critical temperature…
We study a model of rolling particles subject to stochastic fluctuations, which may be relevant in systems of nano- or micro-scale particles where rolling is an approximation for strong static friction. We consider the simplest possible…
In a simple model of a continuous random walk a particle moves in one dimension with the velocity fluctuating between V and -V. If V is associated with the thermal velocity of a Brownian particle and allowed to be position dependent, the…
Application of thermodynamics to driven systems is discussed. As particular examples, simple traffic flow models are considered. On a microscopic level, traffic flow is described by Bando's optimal velocity model in terms of accelerating…
The aim of this paper is to describe the self-propulsion of a micro-robot (or micro-swimmer) consisting of $N$ spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by arms with the lengths changing periodically. For the…
Thermal convection based micro-electromechanical accelerometer is a relatively new kind of acceleration sensor that does not require a solid proof mass, yielding unique benefits like high shock survival rating, low production cost, and…
How thermal equilibrium is determined in a weakly collisional plasma is a fundamental question in plasma physics. This letter shows that the turbulence driven by the magnetic curvature and density gradient tends to equilibrate the…
We investigate to what extent one can use a thermodynamic description of turbulent flow as a source of stochastic kinetic energy for three-dimensional self-assembly of magnetically interacting macroscopic particles. We confirm that the…
We examine the steady state properties of binary systems of driven inelastic hard spheres. The spheres, which move under the influence of gravity, are contained in a vertical cylinder with a vibrating base. We computed the trajectories of…
We study an air-fluidized granular monolayer, composed of plastic spheres which roll on a metallic grid. The air current is adjusted so that the spheres never loose contact with the grid, so that the dynamics may be regarded as pseudo…
We discuss a locomotion of a three-sphere microswimmer in a viscoelastic medium and propose a new type of active microrheology. We derive a relation which connects average swimming velocity and frequency-dependent viscosity of the…
Biomolecular machines are protein complexes that convert between different forms of free energy. They are utilized in nature to accomplish many cellular tasks. As isothermal nonequilibrium stochastic objects at low Reynolds number, they…
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic interpretation. Fluctuation theorems provide fundamental…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
A generalized fluctuation-response relation is found for thermal systems driven out of equilibrium. Its derivation is independent of many details of the dynamics, which is only required to be first-order. The result gives a correction to…
We introduce thermometers to define the local temperature of an electronic system driven out-of-equilibrium by local AC fields. We also define the effective temperature in terms of a local fluctuation-dissipation-relation. We show that…