Related papers: An autonomous single-piston engine with a quantum …
We study the standard four-stroke regenerative quantum Stirling heat engine cycle, which assumes local thermal equilibrium at each stage, within the standard weak-coupling, Markovian open quantum system framework. We point out that the…
This work reports the functioning of a single atom energy-conversion device, operating either as a quantum engine or a refrigerator, coupled to a quantum load. The "working fluid" is comprised of two optical levels of a single ion, and the…
Single-particle heat engines at atomic and colloidal scales obey the universal thermodynamic bounds on work and efficiency. Here, we translate these principles to the macroscale by building an athermal Stirling engine whose working medium…
A high performance gas displacement pump based on four individual cylinders was developed. The magnetically-coupled pistons and the hermetically-sealed housings as well as the special cleanliness in terms of out-gassing and radio-purity…
We construct the smallest possible self contained heat engines; one composed of only two qubits, the other of only a single qutrit. The engines are self-contained as they do not require external sources of work and/or control. They are able…
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 energestics of a thermal motor driven by temperature differences, which consists of Brownian particles moving in a sawtooth potential with an external load where the viscous medium is alternately in contact with hot and cold…
In traditional thermodynamics the Carnot cycle yields the ideal performance bound of heat engines and refrigerators. We propose and analyze a minimal model of a heat machine that can play a similar role in quantum regimes. The minimal model…
Robust quantization of particle transport, as in a Thouless pump, is a hallmark of topological quantum systems with externally controlled system parameters. Here we instead propose and analyze a Thouless pump, for fermions in a…
We have performed an extensive analysis of a single particle stochastic heat engine constructed by manipulating a Brownian particle in a time dependent harmonic potential. The cycle consists of two isothermal steps at different temperatures…
We present a self-contained engine, which is made of one or more two-level systems, each of which is coupled to a single bath, as well as to a common load composed of a particle on a tilted lattice. We show that the energy and the entropy…
We discuss whether, and under which conditions, it is possible to realize a heat engine simply by dynamically modulating the couplings between the quantum working medium and thermal reservoirs. For that purpose, we consider the paradigmatic…
We study the mechanical performance of quantum rotor heat engines in terms of common notions of work using two prototypical models: a mill driven by the heat flow from a hot to a cold mode, and a piston driven by the alternate heating and…
The autonomous heat engine is a model system of autonomous nonequilibrium systems like biological cells, exploiting nonequilibrium flow for operations. As the Carnot engine has essentially contributed to the equilibrium thermodynamics,…
We present the exact theory of quantum engines whose working medium is a network of driven oscillators performing an arbitrary cyclic process while coupled to thermal and nonthermal reservoirs. We show that when coupled to a single…
The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…
Incorporating time into thermodynamics allows addressing the tradeoff between efficiency and power. A qubit engine serves as a toy model to study this tradeoff from first principles, based on the quantum theory of open systems. We study the…
The electron spin is a promising qubit candidate for quantum computation and quantum information. Here we propose and analyze a mechanically-induced single electron spin resonance, which amounts to a rotation of the spin about the $x$-axis…
The possibility to coherently control a quantum rotor is investigated theoretically. The rotor is realized by an antiferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate, trapped in the optical field of a Fabry-Perot resonator. By tuning the…
We studied the efficiency of two different schemes for a magnetically driven quantum heat engine, by considering as the working substance a single nonrelativistic particle trapped in a cylindrical potential well, in the presence of an…