Related papers: Efficient and tunable Aharonov-Bohm quantum heat e…
Cyclical heat engines are a paradigm of classical thermodynamics, but are impractical for miniaturization because they rely on moving parts. A more recent concept is particle-exchange (PE) heat engines, which uses energy filtering to…
Including phonon-assisted inelastic process in thermoelectric devices is able to enhance the performance of nonequilibrium work extraction. In this work, we demonstrate that inelastic phonon-thermoelectric devices have a fertile…
The characterization and control of quantum effects in the performance of thermodynamic tasks may open new avenues for small thermal machines working in the nanoscale. We study the impact of coherence in the energy basis in the operation of…
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…
We investigate Aharonov-Bohm-type oscillations of the thermopower of a quantum dot embedded in a ring for the case when the interaction between electrons can be neglected. The thermopower is shown to be strongly flux dependent, and…
We present a measurement-based quantum thermal machine that extracts work from the back-action of generalized quantum measurements whose working medium is a coupled two-level quantum system. Specifically, we derive universal optimization…
We study quantum transport through two-terminal nanoscale devices in contact with two particle reservoirs at different temperatures and chemical potentials. We discuss the general expressions controlling the electric charge current, heat…
Identifying materials and devices which offer efficient thermoelectric effects at low temperature is a major obstacle for the development of thermal management strategies for low-temperature electronic systems. Superconductors cannot offer…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
We demonstrate operation of a small Fabry-Perot interferometer in which highly coherent Aharonov-Bohm oscillations are observed in the integer and fractional quantum Hall regimes. Using a novel heterostructure design, Coulomb effects are…
A quantum thermal device based on three nearest-neighbor coupled spin-1/2 systems controlled by the magnetic field is proposed. We systematically study the steady-state thermal behaviors of the system. When the two terminals of our system…
Sadi Carnot's theorem regarding the maximum efficiency of heat engines is considered to be of fundamental importance in thermodynamics. This theorem famously states that the maximum efficiency depends only on the temperature of the heat…
We show how one can implement a quantum heat machine by using two interacting trapped ions, in presence of a thermal bath. The electronic states of the ions act like a working substance, while the vibrational mode is modelled as the cold…
The linear conductance of a two-terminal Aharonov-Bohm interferometer is an even function of the applied magnetic flux, as dictated by the Onsager-Casimir symmetry. Away from linear response this symmetry may be broken when many-body…
We model a microscopic heat engine as a particle hopping on a one-dimensional lattice in a periodic sawtooth potential, with or without load, assisted by the thermal kicks it gets from alternately placed hot and cold thermal baths. We find…
The quantum analog of Carnot cycles in few-particle systems consists of two quantum adiabatic steps and two isothermal steps. This construction is formally justified by use of a minimum work principle. It is then shown, without relying on…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…
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 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…