Related papers: Autonomous engines driven by active matter: Energe…

Active matter consumes energy from the environment and transforms it into mechanical work. Notable examples from biology include cell division, bacterial swarms, and muscle contraction. In this work, we investigate the nature of active…

Active matter, as other types of self-organizing systems, relies on the take-up of energy that can be used for different actions, such as active motion or structure formation. Here we provide an agent-based framework to model these…

We propose a simple model for a motor that generates mechanical motion by exploiting an entropic force arising from the topology of the underlying phase space. We show that the generation of mechanical forces in our system is surprisingly…

We consider a rudimentary model for a heat engine, known as the Brownian gyrator, that consists of an overdamped system with two degrees of freedom in an anisotropic temperature field. Whereas the hallmark of the gyrator is a nonequilibrium…

The identification of local pressure in active matter systems remains a subject of considerable debate. Through theoretical calculations and extensive simulations of various active systems, we demonstrate that intrinsic pressure (defined in…

One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli. As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of equilibrium, which leads to many of their fascinating…

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…

Articulated objects like doors, drawers, valves, and tools are pervasive in our everyday unstructured dynamic environments. Articulation models describe the joint nature between the different parts of an articulated object. As most of these…

Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…

These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…

In a single molecule assay, the motion of a molecular motor is often inferred from measuring the stochastic trajectory of a large probe particle attached to it. We discuss a simple model for this generic set-up taking into account…

We derive a hydrodynamic description of metric-free active matter: starting from self-propelled particles aligning with neighbors defined by "topological" rules, not metric zones, -a situation advocated recently to be relevant for bird…

Active particles have become a subject of intense interest across several disciplines from animal behavior to granular physics. Usually the models of such particles contain an explicit internal driving. Here we propose a model with implicit…

We propose a simple theoretical model for a molecular chemical engine that catalyzes a chemical reaction and converts the free energy released by the reaction into mechanical work. Binding and unbinding processes of reactant and product…

The excess work required to drive a stochastic system out of thermodynamic equilibrium through a time-dependent external perturbation is directly related to the amount of entropy produced during the driving process, allowing excess work and…

The state of a classical point-particle system may often be specified by giving the position and momentum for each constituent particle. For non-pointlike particles, the center-of-mass position may be augmented by an additional coordinate…

In this paper, we derive a number of inequalities which express power-efficiency trade-offs that hold generally for thermodynamic machines operating in non-equilibrium stationary states. One of these inequalities concerns the output power,…

In equilibrium, the collective behaviour of particles interacting via steep, short-ranged potentials is well captured by the virial expansion of the free energy at low density. Here, we extend this approach beyond equilibrium to the case of…

Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…

Active particles driven by colored noise can be approximately mapped onto a system that obeys detailed balance. The effective interactions which can be derived for such a system allow to describe the structure and phase behavior of the…