Related papers: Holographic Heat Engines as Quantum Heat Engines
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. Of particular practical relevance…
The efficiency of macroscopic heat engines is restricted by the second law of thermodynamics. They can reach at most the efficiency of a Carnot engine. In contrast, heat currents in mesoscopic heat engines show fluctuations. Thus, there is…
Performance of nano- and micro-scale heat engines can be improved with a help from quantum mechanical phenomena. Recently, heat reservoirs with quantum coherence have been proposed to enhance engine performance beyond the Carnot limit even…
How to rigorously define thermodynamic quantities such as heat, work, and internal energy in open quantum systems driven far from equilibrium remains a significant open question in quantum thermodynamics. Heat is a quantity whose…
This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…
Thermodynamic constraints impose a trade-off between power and efficiency in heat engines, preventing the simultaneous achievement of high power and high efficiency. For classical microscopic engines, explicit inequalities have been…
Recent experimental breakthroughs produced the first nano heat engines that have the potential to harness quantum resources. An instrumental question is how their performance measures up against the efficiency of classical engines. For…
This article presents recent progress in the theory of quantum measurement engines and discusses the implications of them for quantum interpretations and philosophical implications of the theory. Several new measurement engine designs are…
We study the 1-d isotropic Heisenberg model of two spin-1/2 systems as a quantum heat engine. The engine undergoes a four-step Otto cycle where the two adiabatic branches involve changing the external magnetic field at a fixed value of the…
A quantum thermal machine is an open quantum system coupled to hot and cold thermal baths. Thus, its dynamics can be well understood using the concepts and tools from non-Hermitian quantum systems. A hallmark of non-Hermiticity is the…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
Standard thermodynamic treatments of quantum field theory in the presence of black-hole backgrounds reproduce the black hole entropy by usually specializing to the leading order of the heat-kernel or the high-temperature expansion. By…
The study of quantum thermodynamics is key to the development of quantum thermal machines. In contrast to most of the previous proposals based on discrete strokes, here we consider a working substance that is permanently coupled to two or…
This paper presents a conceptual design for quantum heat machines using a pair of coupled double quantum dots (DQDs), each DQD with an excess electron to interact, as an working substance. We define a compression ratio as the ratio between…
Abstract We perform an experiment in which a quantum heat engine works under two reservoirs, one at a positive spin temperature and the other at an effective negative spin temperature i.e., when the spin system presents population…
We consider a photo--Carnot engine that consists of a single--mode radiation field in an optical cavity. One the heat reservoirs is made of a beam of thermally entangled pairs of two--level atoms that interact resonantly with the cavity. We…
The second law of thermodynamics constrains that the efficiency of heat engines, classical or quantum, cannot be greater than the universal Carnot efficiency. We discover another bound for the efficiency of a quantum Otto heat engine…
A dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
We study a quantum heat engine at strong coupling between the system and the thermal reservoirs. Exploiting a collective coordinate mapping, we incorporate system-reservoir correlations into a consistent thermodynamic analysis, thus…
We propose a quantum Otto cycle based on the properties of a two-level system in a realistic out-of-thermal-equilibrium electromagnetic field acting as its sole reservoir. This steady configuration is produced without the need of active…