Related papers: Beating Carnot efficiency with periodically driven…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
Thermodynamics places a limit on the efficiency of heat engines, but not on their output power or on how the power and efficiency change with the engine's cycle time. In this manuscript, we develop a geometrical description of the power and…
Heat engines should ideally have large power output, operate close to Carnot efficiency and show constancy, i.e., exhibit only small fluctuations in this output. For steady-state heat engines, driven by a constant temperature difference…
Aiming to explore physical limits of wind turbines, we develop a model for determining the work extractable from a compressible fluid flow. The model employs conservation of mass, energy and entropy and leads to a universal bound for the…
For thermoelectric transport in the presence of a magnetic field that breaks time-reversal symmetry, a strong bound on the Onsager coefficients is derived within a general set-up using three terminals. Asymmetric Onsager coefficients lead…
Artificial molecular machines are often driven by the periodic variation of an external parameter. This external control exerts work on the system of which a part can be extracted as output if the system runs against an applied load.…
I consider the non-equilibrium DC transport of electrons through a quantum system with a thermoelectric response. This system may be any nanostructure or molecule modeled by the nonlinear scattering theory which includes Hartree-like…
Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…
We analyze the nanocaloritronic performance of an interacting quantum dot that is subject to an applied bias and an applied temperature gradient. It is now well known that, in the absence of phonon contribution, a weakly coupled…
We investigate thermoelectric efficiency of systems with broken time reversal symmetry under a three-terminal transport. Using a model of Aharonov-Bohm interferometer formed with three noninteracting quantum dots, we show that Carnot…
The wave-like nature of electrons leads to the existence of upper bounds on the thermoelectric response of nanostructured devices [R. S. Whitney, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 130601 (2014); Phys. Rev. B 91, 115425 (2015)]. This fundamental result,…
We propose a quantum heat engine based on an Aharonov-Bohm interferometer in a two-terminal geometry, and investigate its thermoelectric performances in the linear response regime. Sizeable thermopower (up to $\sim 0.3\,\text{mV}$/K) as…
Thermodynamics is traditionally constrained to the study of macroscopic systems whose energy fluctuations are negligible compared to their average energy. Here, we push beyond this thermodynamic limit by developing a mathematical framework…
Developments in the thermodynamics of small quantum systems envisage non-classical thermal machines. In this scenario, energy fluctuations play a relevant role in the description of irreversibility. We experimentally implement a quantum…
This work consists in the theorical development on the analysis of the Thermodynamic Laws and thermodynamic systems in relative motion, according to the laws of Classical Mechanics. The difference of this work for many of the literature is…
At the very foundation of the second law of thermodynamics lies the fact that no heat engine operating between two reservoires of temperatures $T_C\leq T_H$ can overperform the ideal Carnot engine: $\langle W \rangle / \langle Q_H \rangle…
We propose a two-stage cycle for an optimized linear-irreversible heat engine that operates, in a finite time, between a hot (cold) reservoir and a finite auxiliary system acting as a sink (source) in the first (second) stage. Under the…
In this review the debated rapport between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics is addressed in the framework of the theory of periodically-driven/controlled quantum-thermodynamic machines. The basic model studied here is that of a…
The minimal set of thermodynamic control parameters consists of a statistical (thermal) and a mechanical one. These suffice to introduce all the pertinent thermodynamic variables; thermodynamic processes can then be defined as paths on this…
We study microscopic engines that use a single active particle as their "working medium". Part of the energy required to drive the directed motion of the particle can be recovered as work, even at constant temperature. A wide class of…