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Related papers: Active engines: Thermodynamics moves forward

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Thermodynamics of nanoscale devices is an active area of research. Despite their noisy surrounding they often produce mechanical work (e.g. micro-heat engines), display rectified Brownian motion (e.g. molecular motors). This invokes…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Arnab Saha , Rahul Marathe , P. S. Pal , A. M. Jayannavar

What are the resources that can be leveraged for a thermodynamic device to exhibit genuine quantum advantage? Typically, the answer to this question is sought in quantum correlations. In the present work, we show that quantum Otto engines…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-05-20 Sebastian Deffner

Quantum many-body systems present substantial technical challenges from both analytical and numerical perspectives. Despite these difficulties, some progress has been made, including studies of interacting atomic gases and interacting…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-08 Anass Hminat , Abdallah Slaoui , Brahim Amghar , Rachid Ahl Laamara

Heat engines near the adiabatic limit typically assume a working medium at thermal equilibrium. However, quantum many-body systems often showcase conservation laws that hinder thermalization, leading to prethermalization in exotic…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-27 Alberto Brollo , Adolfo del Campo , Alvise Bastianello

Examples of self propulsion in strongly fluctuating environment is abound in nature, e.g., molecular motors and pumps operating in living cells. Starting from Langevin equation of motion, we develop a fluctuating thermodynamic description…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-02-20 Chandrima Ganguly , Debasish Chaudhuri

Based on quantum thermodynamic processes, we make a quantum-mechanical (QM) extension of the typical heat engine cycles, such as the Carnot, Brayton, Otto, and Diesel cycles, etc. The temperature is not included in these QM engine cycles,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-02-05 Jianhui Wang , Yongli Ma , Jizhou He

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2009-11-11 Baoquan Ai , Liqiu Wang , Huizhang Xie , Lianggang Liu

We investigate the quantum thermodynamic cycle of a quantum heat engine carrying out an Otto thermodynamic cycle. We use the thermal properties of a moving heat bath with relativistic velocity with respect to the cold bath. As a working…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-10-25 Nikolaos Papadatos

Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-12-31 Jérémie Klinger , Grant M. Rotskoff

We study the unitary time evolution of a simple quantum Hamiltonian describing a heat engine coupled to two heat baths. The engine is modeled as a three-level system. Each heat bath consists of a single harmonic oscillator. The engine is…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2013-06-27 Winny O'Kelly de Galway , Jan Naudts

Cavity optomechanical systems are a paradigmatic setting for the conversion of electromagnetic energy into mechanical work. Experiments with atoms coupled to cavity modes are realized in nonequilibrium conditions, described by…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-03-05 Paulo J. Paulino , Igor Lesanovsky , Federico Carollo

Standard heat machines (engine, heat pump, refrigerator) are composed of a system ("working fluid") coupled to at least two equilibrium baths at different temperatures and periodically driven by an external device (piston or rotor) called…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-11-26 Rober Alicki , David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky

By modelling heat engines as driven multi-partite system we show that their dissipation can be expressed in terms of the lag (relative entropy) between the perturbed state of each partition and their equilibrium state, and the correlations…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-07-19 Michele Campisi , Rosario Fazio

There are two paradigms to study nanoscale engines in stochastic and quantum thermodynamics. Autonomous models, which do not rely on any external time-dependence, and models that make use of time-dependent control fields, often combined…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-10 Philipp Strasberg , Christopher W. Wächtler , Gernot Schaller

We will study a class of system composed of interacting unicyclic machines placed in contact with a hot and cold thermal baths subjected to a non-conservative driving worksource. Despite their simplicity, these models showcase an intricate…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-10-19 Iago N. Mamede , Karel Proesmans , Carlos E. Fiore

We review recent progress in developing effective field theories (EFTs) for non-equilibrium processes at finite temperature, including a new formulation of fluctuating hydrodynamics, and a new proof of the second law of thermodynamics.…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2018-05-25 Paolo Glorioso , Hong Liu

We study a quantum thermal engine model for which the heat transfer law is determined by Einstein's theory of radiation. The working substance of the quantum engine is assumed to be a two-level quantum systems of which the constituent…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-11-30 H. Yan , Hao Guo

The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2010-03-11 Gautam I. Menon

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…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2012-08-01 Tomi Ruokola , Teemu Ojanen

A heat engine is a machine which uses the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir to extract work. Here both reservoirs are quantum systems and a heat engine is described by a unitary transformation which decreases the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-11 Dominik Janzing