Related papers: Hybrid Thermal Machines: Generalized Thermodynamic…
Maintaining temperature is crucial in both daily life and industrial settings, ensuring human comfort and device functionality. In the quest for energy conservation and emission reduction, several contemporary passive temperature control…
We investigate the fundamental dimensional limits to thermodynamic machines. In particular we show that it is possible to construct self-contained refrigerators (i.e. not requiring external sources of work) consisting of only a small number…
Collisional reservoirs are becoming a major tool for modelling open quantum systems. In their simplest implementation, an external agent switches on, for a given time, the interaction between the system and a specimen from the reservoir.…
The study of quantum thermodynamics is key to the development of quantum thermal machines. In contrast to most of the previous proposals based on discrete strokes, here we consider a working substance that is permanently coupled to two or…
A quantum thermodynamic system is described by a Hamiltonian and a list of conserved, non-commuting charges, and a fundamental goal is to determine the minimum energy of the system subject to constraints on the charges. Recently, [Liu et…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
Quantum heat engines employ as working agents multi-level systems instead of gas-filled cylinders. We consider particularly two-level agents such as electrons immersed in a magnetic field. Work is produced in that case when the electrons…
The limit of small entropy production is reached in relaxing systems long after preparation, and in stationary driven systems in the limit of small driving power. Surprisingly, for extended systems this limit is not in general the…
Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…
The energy efficiency and power of a quantum thermoelectric system with multiple electric currents and only one heat currents are studied. The system is connected to the hot heat bath with one terminal but the cold bath with multiple…
The performance characteristics of a heat rectifier and a heat pump are studied in a non Markovian framework. The device is constructed from a molecule connected to a hot and cold reservoir. The heat baths are modelled using the stochastic…
For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…
In this chapter we address the topic of quantum thermodynamics in the presence of additional observables beyond the energy of the system. In particular we discuss the special role that the generalized Gibbs ensemble plays in this theory,…
Quantum and classical systems can consistently be coupled via non-unitary time-irreversible mechanisms. In this paper we characterize which kind of corresponding dynamics converge in the stationary regime to a thermal hybrid state, that is,…
We propose a quantum thermal machine composed of two nanomechanical resonators (NMR) (two membranes suspended over a trench in a substrate), placed a few $\mu$m from each other. The quantum thermodynamical cycle is powered by the Casimir…
Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…
We present a study of the performance of endoreversible thermal machines optimized with respect to the thermodynamic force associated with the cold bath in the regime of small thermodynamic forces. These thermal machines can work either as…
We present a general unified approach for the study of quantum thermal machines, including both heat engines and refrigerators, operating under periodic adiabatic driving and in contact with thermal reservoirs kept at different…
In this brief note, we compare two frameworks for characterizing possible operations in quantum thermodynamics. One framework considers Thermal Operations---unitaries which conserve energy. The other framework considers all maps which…
We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which have traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of…