Related papers: Conversion of heat to work: An efficient inchworm
We present here a machine that is capable of extracting work from a single heat bath. Although no significant temperature gradient is involved in the operation of the machine, yet the Carnot efficiency as high as one is achievable. Working…
Understanding how the effectiveness of natural photosynthetic energy harvesting systems arises from the interplay between quantum coherence and environmental noise represents a significant challenge for quantum theory. Recently it has begun…
A fluid-structure interaction problem with the melting of water around a heated horizontal circular cylinder is analysed with numerical simulations. Dynamic meshing was used for evolving the flow domain in time as the melting front extended…
We present a scattering approach for the study of the transport and thermodynamics of quantum systems strongly coupled to their thermal environment(s). This formalism recovers the standard non-equilibrium Green's function expressions for…
Dynamics of molecular motor dimers, consisting of rigidly bound particles that move along two parallel lattices and interact with underlying molecular tracks, is investigated theoretically by analyzing discrete-state stochastic…
The strength of fluctuations, as measured by their variance, is paramount in the quantitative description of a large class of physical systems, ranging from simple and complex liquids to active fluids and solids. Fluctuations originate from…
Conventional continuous quantum heat engines with incoherent heat transfer perform poorly as they exploit two-body interactions between the system and hot or cold baths, thus having limited capability to outperform their classical…
We study diffusion properties of an inertial Brownian motor moving on a ratchet substrate, i.e. a periodic structure with broken reflection symmetry. The motor is driven by an unbiased time-periodic symmetric force which takes the system…
It is now widely accepted that heating processes play a fundamental role in galaxy clusters, struggling in an intricate but fascinating `dance' with its antagonist, radiative cooling. Last generation observations, especially X-ray, are…
Ratchet effect, observed in many systems starting from living organism to artificially designed device, is a manifestation of motion in asymmetric potential. Here we report results of a conductivity study of Polypyrrole nanowires, which…
Previous work shows that a net directed motion arises from a system of individual particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics in the presence of an array of asymmetric barriers. Here, we show that when the individual particle is replaced…
Ratcheting surfaces are a common motif in nature and appear in plant awns and grasses. They are known to profer selective advantages for seed dispersion and burial. In two simple model experiments we show that these anisotropically toothed…
At the dawn of thermodynamics, Carnot's constraint on efficiency of heat engines stimulated the formulation of one of the most universal physical principles, the second law of thermodynamics. In recent years, the field of heat engines…
A colloidal particle immersed in a bath of bacteria is a typical example of a passive particle in an active bath. To model this, we take an overdamped harmonically trapped particle subjected to a thermal and a non-equilibrium noise arising…
The fluctuation-dissipation relation is well known for the quantum open system with energy dissipation. In this paper a similar underlying relation is found between the bath fluctuation and the dephasing of the quantum open system, of which…
We study the performance of a quantum Otto heat engine with two spins coupled by a Heisenberg interaction, taking into account not only the mean values of work and efficiency but also their fluctuations. We first show that, for this system,…
Directional motion is commonly observed in various living active systems, such as bacterial colonies moving through confined environments. In these systems, the dynamics arise from the collective effects of mutual interactions between…
Periodically driven many-body systems generally heat towards a featureless 'infinite-temperature' state. As an alternative to uniform heating in a clean system, here we establish a Floquet superheating regime, where fast heating nucleates…
Conventional kinesin is a dimeric motor protein that transports membranous organelles toward the plus-end of microtubules (MTs). Individual kinesin dimers show steadfast directionality and hundreds of consecutive steps, yetthe detailed…
Ratchets are dynamic systems where particle transport is induced by zero-average forces due to the interplay between nonlinearity and asymmetry. Generally, they rely on the effect of a strong external driving. We show that stationary…