Related papers: Thermal Motors with Enhanced Performance due to En…

We study the energestics of a thermal motor driven by temperature differences, which consists of Brownian particles moving in a sawtooth potential with an external load where the viscous medium is alternately in contact with hot and cold…

We introduce a new class of mesoscopic heat engines consisting of a tunnel junction coupled to a linear thermal bath. Work is produced by transporting electrons up against a voltage bias like in ordinary thermoelectrics but heat is…

We consider a model of a Brownian motor composed of two coupled overdamped degrees of freedom moving in periodic potentials and driven by two heat reservoirs. This model exhibits a spontaneous breaking of symmetry and gives rise to directed…

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…

Exceptional points (EPs) in non-Hermitian systems have recently attracted wide interests and spawned intriguing prospects for enhanced sensing. However, EPs have not yet been realized in thermal atomic ensembles, which is one of the most…

Topological operations have the merit of achieving certain goals without requiring accurate control over local operational details. To date, topological operations have been used to control geometric phases, and have been proposed as a…

Superconducting quantum circuits are potential candidates to realize a large-scale quantum computer. The envisioned large density of integrated components, however, requires a proper thermal management and control of dissipation. To this…

Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…

We study how to achieve the ultimate power in the simplest, yet non trivial, model of a thermal machine, namely a two-level quantum system coupled to two thermal baths. Without making any prior assumption on the protocol, via optimal…

The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…

We show that coupled autonomous thermal machines, in the presence of three heat reservoirs and following a global linear-irreversible description, provide a unified framework to accommodate the variety of expressions for the efficiency at…

There are many exotic thermodynamic processes that are hard to study in nature. Here, we synthesize a structured environment to explore the extremes of thermodynamics. We present an engine running at extreme temperatures of above ten…

We study the efficiency at maximum power of two coupled heat engines, using thermoelectric generators (TEGs) as engines. Assuming that the heat and electric charge fluxes in the TEGs are strongly coupled, we simulate numerically the…

Optimisation of heat engines at the micro-scale has applications in biological and artificial nano-technology, and stimulates theoretical research in non-equilibrium statistical physics. Here we consider non-interacting overdamped particles…

We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…

The performance of endoreversible thermal machines operating at finite power constitutes one of the main challenges of nonequilibrium classical and quantum thermodynamics, engineering and others. We introduce the idea of adjusting the…

Exceptional points are spectral singularities where both eigenvalues and eigenvectors collapse onto a single mode, causing the system behavior to shift abruptly and making it highly responsive to even small perturbations. Although widely…

We propose a simple model for a motor that generates mechanical motion by exploiting an entropic force arising from the topology of the underlying phase space. We show that the generation of mechanical forces in our system is surprisingly…

Conventional thermionic power generators and refrigerators utilize a barrier in the direction of transport to selectively transmit high-energy electrons. Here we show that the energy spectrum of electrons transmitted in this way is not…

Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians can give rise to exceptional points (EPs) which have been extensively explored with nominally identical coupled resonators. Here a non-Hermitian electromechanical system is developed which hosts vibration modes…