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Heat engines extract work by running cyclically between two heat reservoirs. When the two reservoirs are thermal and at different temperatures, the maximum efficiency of the engine is given by the Carnot limit. Here we consider a quantum…
Heat engines transform thermal energy into useful work, operating in a cyclic manner. For centuries, they have played a key role in industrial and technological development. Historically, only gases and liquids have been used as working…
The study of thermal heat engines was pivotal to establishing the principles of equilibrium thermodynamics, with implications far wider than only engine optimization. For nonequilibrium systems, which by definition dissipate energy even at…
Classical engines turn thermal resources into work, which is maximized for reversible operations. The quantum realm has expanded the range of useful operations beyond energy conversion, and incoherent resources beyond thermal reservoirs.…
The construction of efficient thermal engines operating at finite times constitutes a fundamental and timely topic in nonequilibrium thermodynamics. We introduce a strategy for optimizing the performance of Brownian engines, based on a…
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…
A theory is developed to describe the coupled transport of energy and charge in networks of electron donor-acceptor sites which are seated in a thermally heterogeneous environment, where the transfer kinetics are dominated by Marcus-type…
We introduce and analyze a class of heat engines composed of interacting units, in which the thermal reservoir is associated with the neighborhood surrounding each unit. These systems can be mapped onto stochastic opinion models and are…
We provide a consistent thermodynamic analysis of stochastic thermal engines driven by finite-size reservoirs, which are in turn coupled to infinite-size reservoirs. We consider a cyclic operation mode, where the working medium couples…
We present a model for an autonomous quantum thermal machine comprised of two qubits capable of manipulating and even amplifying the local coherence in a non-degenerate external system. The machine uses only thermal resources, namely,…
Exceptional points as branch singularities describe peculiar degeneracies of non-Hermitian systems that do not obey energy conservation. This work shows that exceptional points can emerge in a topological photonic system, for example, the…
Exceptional points are singularities in the spectrum of non-Hermitian systems in which several eigenvectors are linearly dependent and their eigenvalues are equal to each other. Usually it is assumed that the order of the exceptional point…
We consider the performance of periodically driven stochastic heat engines in the linear response regime. Reaching the theoretical bounds for efficiency and efficiency at maximum power typically requires full control over the design and the…
We analyze the power output of a quantum dot machine coupled to two electronic reservoirs via thermoelectric contacts, and to two thermal reservoirs - one hot and one cold. This machine is a nanoscale analogue of a conventional thermocouple…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
The development of efficient artificial nanodevices poses challenges which are of fundamental and technological nature. Recent progress has been made in the context of finite-time thermodynamics. A central question in finite-time…
Exceptional points (EPs), i.e., non-Hermitian degeneracies at which eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, can be realized by tuning the gain/loss contrast of different modes in non-Hermitian systems or by engineering the asymmetric…
Above-threshold light emission from plasmonic tunnel junctions, when emitted photons have energies significantly higher than the energy scale of the incident electrons, has attracted much recent interest in nano-optics, while the underlying…
In a spatially periodic temperature profile, directed transport of an overdamped Brownian particle can be induced along a periodic potential. With a load force applied to the particle, this setup can perform as a heat engine. For a given…
The purpose of this work is to present the concept of an autonomous Stirling-like engine powered by anisotropy of thermodynamic fluctuations. Specifically, simultaneous contact of a thermodynamic system with two heat baths along coupled…