Related papers: Universal constraint for efficiency and power of a…
Quantum cycles in established heat engines can be modeled with various quantum systems as working substances. For example, a heat engine can be modeled with an infinite potential well as the working substance to determine the efficiency and…
Considerable attention has been devoted to microscopic heat engines in both theoretical and experimental aspects. Notably, the fundamental limits pertaining to power and efficiency, as well as the tradeoff relations between these two…
Conventional heat engines typically require two distinct thermal reservoirs, with their efficiency strictly bounded by the Carnot limit. We present a theoretical design for a phase-change heat engine that utilizes water as the working fluid…
The unavoidable irreversible losses of power in a heat engine are found to be of quantum origin. Following thermodynamic tradition a model quantum heat engine operating by the Otto cycle is analyzed. The working medium of the model is…
It is common in many thermodynamic textbooks to illustrate the Carnot theorem through the usage of diverse state equations for gases, paramagnets, and other simple thermodynamic systems. As it is well-known, the universality of the Carnot…
The pursuit of achieving the maximum power in microscopic thermal engines has gained increasing attention in recent studies of stochastic thermodynamics. We employ the optimal control theory to study the performance of Brownian heat engines…
Whether the strong coupling to thermal baths can improve the performance of quantum thermal machines remains an open issue under active debate. Here, we revisit quantum thermal machines operating with the quasi-static Carnot cycle and aim…
We study the stochastic energetic exchanges in quantum heat engines. Due to microreversibility, these obey a fluctuation relation, called the heat engine fluctuation relation, which implies the Carnot bound: no machine can have an…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
The Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency has long served as the definite upper bound for the thermal efficiency at maximum output power, and has thus shaped the development of finite-time thermodynamics. In this paper, we repeal the ruling consensus…
Recently, a formal analogy between the fluctuating diffusivity and thermodynamics has been proposed based on phenomena of heterogeneous diffusion observed in living cells. This not only offers the analogs of the quantity of heat and work as…
A cyclic thermodynamic heat engine runs most efficiently if it is reversible. Carnot constructed such a reversible heat engine by combining adiabatic and isothermal processes for a system containing an ideal gas. Here, we present an example…
We propose a simple classical dynamical model of a thermoelectric (or thermochemical) heat engine based on a pair of ideal gas containers connected by two unequal scattering channels. The model is solved analytically and it is shown that a…
We study the optimal performance of an endoreversible quantum dot heat engine, in which the heat transfer between the system and baths is mediated by qubits, operating under the conditions of a trade-off objective function known as maximum…
It is known that an engine with ideal efficiency ($\eta =1$ for a chemical engine and $e = e_{\rm Carnot}$ for a thermal one) has zero power because a reversible cycle takes an infinite time. However, at least from a theoretical point of…
We study the statistics of the efficiency in a class of isothermal cyclic machines with realistic coupling between the internal degrees of freedom. We derive, under fairly general assumptions, the probability distribution function for the…
Giving a universal upper bound on the power output of heat engines is a long-standing open problem. We tackle this problem for generic quantum machines in self-contained formulation by carefully including the switching process of the…
Optimization of cyclic stochastic heat engines, a topic spanning decades of research, commonly assumes fixed control or response parameters at discrete points in the cycle-a limitation that often leads to experimentally impractical…
The efficiency and cooling power of a two-terminal thermoelectric refrigerator are analyzed near the limit of vanishing dissipation (ideal system), where the optimal efficiency is the Carnot one, but the cooling power then unfortunately…
We develop a perturbation theory of quantum (and classical) master equations with slowly varying parameters, applicable to systems which are externally controlled on a time scale much longer than their characteristic relaxation time. We…