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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…
We study a quantum thermal engine model for which the heat transfer law is determined by Einstein's theory of radiation. The working substance of the quantum engine is assumed to be a two-level quantum systems of which the constituent…
The reversible nature of thermodynamical cycles is an idealisation based on the assumption of perfect quasi-static dynamics. As a consequence of this assumption, ideal engines operate at the maximum efficiency but have zero power. Realistic…
Incorporating time into thermodynamics allows addressing the tradeoff between efficiency and power. A qubit engine serves as a toy model to study this tradeoff from first principles, based on the quantum theory of open systems. We study the…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…
From the steam engine to current nano-devices, the design of efficient thermal machines has been instrumental in modern societies. In its essence a thermal engine can be thought as a working substance, in contact with two or more baths,…
Starting with Carnot engine, the ideal efficiency of a heat engine has been associated with quasi-static transformations and vanishingly small output power. Here, we exactly calculate the thermodynamic properties of a isothermal heat…
Thermodynamics places a limit on the efficiency of heat engines, but not on their output power or on how the power and efficiency change with the engine's cycle time. In this manuscript, we develop a geometrical description of the power and…
Using the fluctuation theorem supplemented with geometric arguments, we derive universal features of the (long-time) efficiency fluctuations for thermal and isothermal machines operating under steady or periodic driving, close or far from…
The ideal gas laws are derived from the democritian concept of corpuscles moving in vacuum plus a principle of simplicity, namely that these laws are independent of the laws of motion aside from the law of energy conservation. A single…
We generalize the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, providing an entropic upper bound for average fluxes in time-continuous steady-state systems (Gingrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 120601 (2016)), to time-discrete Markov chains and to…
Time-reversal had always been assumed to be a symmetry of physics at the fundamental level. In this paper we will explore the violations of time-reversal symmetry at the fundamental level and the consequences on thermodynamic systems.…
The derivation of general performance benchmarks is important in the design of highly optimized heat engines and refrigerators. To obtain them, one may model phenomenologically the leading sources of irreversibility ending up with results…
Present-day thermodynamics has long outgrown the initial frames of the heat-engine theory and transmuted into a rather general macroscopic method for studying kinetics of various transfer processes in their inseparable connection with the…
A process, carried out in a stepwise manner, becomes quasi-static when the number of intermediate steps tends to infinity. Usually, the net entropy production approaches zero under this limiting condition. Hence, such cases are termed…
Semi-Markov processes generalize Markov processes by adding temporal memory effects as expressed by a semi-Markov kernel. We recall the path weight for a semi-Markov trajectory and the fact that thermodynamic consistency in equilibrium…
Recent understanding of the thermodynamics of small-scale systems have enabled the characterization of the thermodynamic requirements of implementing quantum processes for fixed input states. Here, we extend these results to construct…
We analyze an autonomous micro-engine as a closed quantum mechanical system, including the work it performs and the fuel it consumes. Our model system shows by example that it is possible to transfer energy steadily and spontaneously…
On the assumption that experimentally validated tabulated thermodynamic properties of saturated fluids published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are accurate, a theoretical thermodynamic cycle can be demonstrated that…
Thermoelectricity is traditionally explained via Onsager's irreversible, flux-force framework. The coupled flows of heat and electric charge are modelled as steady-state flows, driven by the thermodynamic forces defined in terms of the…