Related papers: Where and how is entropy generated in solar energy…

A huge amount of thermal energy is available close to material surfaces in radiative and non-radiative states, which can be useful for matter characterization or for energy devices. One way to harness this near-field energy is to scatter it…

The Sun is the most constrained and well-studied of all stars. As a consequence, the physical ingredients entering solar models are used as a reference to study all other stars observed in the Universe. However, our understanding of the…

The selfconsistent model for the temperature dependence of photoconversion efficiency $\eta$ for highly efficient silicon solar cells (SCs) is developed. It is demonstrated that effect of the efficiency decrease due to increasing…

Entropy generation in a chemical reaction is analyzed without using the general formalism of non-equilibrium thermodynamics at a level adequate for advanced undergraduates. In a first approach to the problem, the phenomenological kinetic…

A central concept in the connection between physics and information theory is entropy, which represents the amount of information extracted from the system by the observer performing measurements in an experiment. Indeed, Jaynes' principle…

In a series of earlier papers, we have developed expressions for ion and electron velocity distribution functions and theirvelocity moments at the passage over the solar wind termination shock. As we have shown there, with introduction of…

From thermodynamics point of view, in this era of aiming at energy conservation and sustainability, we need to develop more accurate ways to design thermal power, cooling and heat pump cycles. It has been the general practice in…

The Renyi entropy is a generalization of the usual concept of entropy which depends on a parameter q. In fact, Renyi entropy is closely related to free energy. Suppose we start with a system in thermal equilibrium and then suddenly divide…

We investigate how entanglement entropy can drive particle creation, deriving explicit relations between entropy and the radiated particle spectrum, the total number of particles, and the total energy. Particle production is computed for…

The present article reports a comprehensive energy balance analysis of a photon-enhanced thermionic emission (PETE) device when it is used for concentrated solar power (CSP) generation. To this end, we consider a realistic PETE device…

Extraction of charge carriers from a hot carrier solar cell using energy selective contacts, and the impact on limiting power conversion efficiency is analyzed. It is shown that assuming isentropic conversion of carrier heat into voltage…

Quantum open systems evolve according to completely positive, trace preserving maps acting on the density operator, which can equivalently be unraveled in term of so-called quantum trajectories. These stochastic sequences of pure states…

Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded…

The physics of driven-dissipative transitions is currently a topic of great interest, particularly in quantum optical systems. These transitions occur in systems kept out of equilibrium and are therefore characterized by a finite entropy…

The total entropy production fluctuations are studied in some exactly solvable models. For these systems, the detailed fluctuation theorem holds even in the transient state, provided initially the system is prepared in thermal equilibrium.…

A unified thermodynamic formalism describing the efficiency of learning is proposed. First, we derive an inequality, which is more strength than Clausius's inequality, revealing the lower bound of the entropy-production rate of a subsystem.…

In a glassy system different degrees of freedom have well-separated characteristic times, and are described by different temperatures. The stationary state is essentially non-equilibrium. A generalized statistical thermodynamics is…

The proper definition of entropy is fundamental to the relationship between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. It also plays a major role in the recent debate about the validity of the concept of negative temperature. In this paper,…

We study the entropy production of a system with a finite number of states connected by random transition rates. The stationary entropy production, driven out of equilibrium both by asymmetric transition rates and by an external probability…

The entropy produced when a quantum system is driven away from equilibrium can be decomposed in two parts, one related with populations and the other with quantum coherences. The latter is usually based on the so-called relative entropy of…