Related papers: Conversion of heat to work: An efficient inchworm
Vibration-based flow energy harvesting enables robust, in-situ energy extraction for low-power applications, such as distributed sensor networks. Fluid-structure instabilities dictate a harvester's viability since the structural response to…
The spontaneous clustering of a vibrofluidized granular gas is employed to generate directed transport in two different compartmentalized systems: a "granular fountain" in which the transport takes the form of convection rolls, and a…
\citet{turner1957} proposed that dry thermals entrain because of buoyancy (via a constraint which requires an increase in the radius $a$). This however, runs counter to the scaling arguments commonly used to derive the entrainment rate,…
Water molecules, confined in a carbon nanotube, were monitored using molecular dynamics simulation. Spontaneous directional transportation during a long timescale was observed in the symmetrical nanochannel by a ratchet-like mechanism. This…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
I suggest a solution to a persistent mystery in the physics of turbulent shear flows: cumulus clouds rise to towering heights, practically without entraining the ambient medium, while apparently similar turbulent jets in general lose their…
Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…
We consider heat fluctuations and fluctuation theorems for systems driven by multiple reservoirs. We establish a fundamental symmetry obeyed by the joint probability distribution for the heat transfers and system coordinates. The symmetry…
We consider a heat conduction model introduced in \cite{Collet-Eckmann 2009}. This is an open system in which particles exchange momentum with a row of (fixed) scatterers. We assume simplified bath conditions throughout, and give a…
Information engines can convert thermal fluctuations of a bath at temperature $T$ into work at rates of order $k_\mathrm{B}T$ per relaxation time of the system. We show experimentally that such engines, when in contact with a bath that is…
I put forth a scenario of jet-driven jittering-jets in cooling flows in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. By uplifting cool gas from the center of the cluster jets and the bubbles they inflate cause the direction of later jets to…
We report an experimental investigation of momentum diffusion in the delta-function kicked rotor where time symmetry is broken by a two-period kicking cycle and spatial symmetry by an alternating linear potential. We exploit this, and a…
We report on experimental evidence of directed electron transport, induced by external linear-polarized microwave irradiation, in a two-dimensional spatially-periodic asymmetrical system called ratchet. The broken spatial symmetry was…
Spontaneous directed motion, a hallmark of cell biology, is unusual in classical statistical physics. Here we study, using both numerical and analytical methods, organized motion in models of the cytoskeleton in which constituents are…
Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
The understanding of the underlying dynamical mechanisms which determine the macroscopic laws of heat conduction is a long standing task of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. A better understanding of the mechanism of heat conduction…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…
We present simulations that reveal a surprisingly large effect of hydrodynamic coupling on the speed of thermal ratchet motors. The model that we use considers particles performing thermal ratchet motion in a hydrodynamic solvent. Using…
We have investigated the recently proposed self-consistent theory of fluctuation - induced transport. In this framework the subsystem under study is coupled to two independent baths at different temperatures. In this non-equilibrium system…
This paper revisits the classical problem of representing a thermal bath interacting with a system as a large collection of harmonic oscillators initially in thermal equilibrium. As is well known the system then obeys an equation, which in…