Related papers: Limits to Energy Conversion
Feedback control mechanisms are ubiquitous in science and technology, and play an essential role in regulating physical, biological and engineering systems. The standard second law of thermodynamics does not hold in the presence of…
To what extent do thermodynamic resource theories capture physically relevant constraints? Inspired by quantum computation, we define a set of elementary thermodynamic gates that only act on 2 energy levels of a system at a time. We show…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
Continuous particle exchange thermal machines require no time-dependent driving, can be realised in solid-state electronic devices, and miniaturised to nanometre scale. Quantum dots, providing a narrow energy filter and allowing to…
The classical Second Law of Thermodynamics demands that an isolated system evolves with a non-diminishing entropy. This holds as well in quantum mechanics if the evolution of the energy-isolated system can be described by a unital quantum…
We provide a unified thermodynamic formalism describing information transfers in autonomous as well as nonautonomous systems described by stochastic thermodynamics. We demonstrate how information is continuously generated in an auxiliary…
The mechanical force from light -- radiation pressure -- provides an intrinsic nonlinear interaction. Consequently, optomechanical systems near their steady state, such as the canonical optical spring, can display non-analytic behavior as a…
Passive systems are characterized by their inability to generate energy internally, providing a powerful tool for modeling physical phenomena. Additionally, algebraically encoding passivity in the system description can be advantageous. For…
The Kelvin-Planck statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a stricture on the nature of heat receipt by any body suffering a cyclic process. It makes no mention of temperature or of entropy. Beginning with a Kelvin-Planck statement…
Possible application of a result contradicting to the second law of thermodynamics is announced. According to this result the chaotic energy of thermal fluctuation can be transformed in electric energy of direct current in an inhomogeneous…
Recent developments point to a breakdown in the generalized second law of thermodynamics for theories with Lorentz symmetry violation. It appears possible to construct a perpetual motion machine of the second kind in such theories, using a…
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat simultaneously flows from the hot to cold bath on average. To go beyond this picture, a range of works in the past decade show that, other than the average dynamical heat flux determined…
Recent papers discussing thermodynamic processes in strongly coupled quantum systems claim a violation of Landauer's principle and imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. If true, this would have powerful consequences.…
It is shown that a heat energy can be transformed in an electric energy of direct current by the use of an inhomogeneous superconducting ring. This trasformation is possible both at an iterative change of temperature and at an unaltered…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
We have developed a theoretical formalism to introduce temperature as a parameter into the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics using the laws of classical thermodynamics and the canonical ensemble scheme of statistical…
We develop a general theory for thermal transport in anharmonic systems under the weak system-bath coupling approximation similar to the quantum master equation formalism. A current operator is derived, which is valid not only in the steady…
This paper deals with the problem of control of partially known nonlinear systems, which have an open-loop stable equilibrium, but we would like to add a PI controller to regulate its behavior around another operating point. Our main…
Several recent theories address the efficiency of a macroscopic thermodynamic motor at maximum power and question the so-called "Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency." Considering the entropy exchanges and productions in an n-sources motor, we…
We show that a local measurement of temperature and voltage for a quantum system in steady state, arbitrarily far from equilibrium, with arbitrary interactions within the system, is unique when it exists. This is interpreted as a…