Related papers: Limits to Energy Conversion
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
Environments in quantum thermodynamics usually take the role of heat baths. These baths are Markovian, weakly coupled to the system, and initialized in a thermal state. Whenever one of these properties is missing, standard quantum…
In this paper we carefully reexamine the various framworks existing in the field of relativistic thermodynamics. We scrutinize in particular the different conceptual foundations of notions like the relativistic work, heat force, moving heat…
It is a universal phenomenon that the state and input of the continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) systems are both disturbed. This paper proposes a (state, input)-disturbed port-Hamiltonian framework that can be used to model and further…
We analyze standard theoretical models of solar energy conversion developed to study solar cells and photosynthetic systems. We show that the assumption that the energy transfer to the reaction center/electric circuit is through a decay…
The paper is grounded on the author's book '"Thermal Death" on the Earth and the scenario how to prevent it' (Moscow, URSS, 2009, bibl.571). While consuming energy, we finally practically all the produced energy is dissipated as heat. As…
The controversial existence of negative temperatures has stirred interesting debates that have reached the foundations of thermodynamics, including questions on the second law, the Carnot efficiency and the statistical definition of…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
We propose an embedding of standard active particle models in terms of two-temperature processes. One temperature refers to an ambient thermal bath, and the other temperature effectively describes ``hot spots,'' i.e., systems with few…
Unconventional cycles provide a useful didactic resource to discuss the second law of thermodynamics applied to thermal motors and their efficiency. In most cases they involve a negative slope, linear process that presents an adiabatic…
It is a common view in philosophy of physics that thermodynamics is a non-fundamental theory. This is motivated in particular by the fact that thermodynamics is considered to be a paradigmatic example for a theory that can be reduced to…
We consider the entropy production of a strongly coupled bipartite system. The total entropy production can be partitioned into various components, which we use to define local versions of the Second Law that are valid without the usual…
Understanding the fundamental limits of various energy conversion approaches is essential for assessing their efficiency and power output. In this work, we derive general performance bounds for thermoradiative heat engines that exchange…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
This article is a short version of a longer article to appear in Physics Reports (cond-mat/9708200). The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
How to rigorously define thermodynamic quantities such as heat, work, and internal energy in open quantum systems driven far from equilibrium remains a significant open question in quantum thermodynamics. Heat is a quantity whose…
The second law of thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous heat from a cold to a hot body. However, it has been theoretically and experimentally shown that energy can flow from a cold to a hot body if the bodies are initially correlated. We…
Thermodynamic random processes in thermal systems are generally associated with one or several relaxation times, the inverse of which are formally homogeneous with energy. Here, we show in a precise way that the periodic modification of…