Related papers: Fluctuations in heat engines
Understanding the connections between information and thermodynamics has been among the most visible applications of stochastic thermodynamics. While recent theoretical advances have established that the second law of thermodynamics sets…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…
Molecular motors are known to have the high efficiency of energy transformation in the presence of thermal fluctuation. Motivated by the surprising fact, recent studies of thermal ratchet models are showing how and when work should be…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
Fluctuation theorems, which have been developed over the past 15 years, have resulted in fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of how irreversibility emerges from reversible dynamics, and have provided new statistical mechanical…
The efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound. This bound follows from the second law of thermodynamics and is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the…
The experimental verification of the Fluctuation Theorem by Wang et al. is not a violation but even a confirmation of the second law, resulting from their observations in a proper interpretation.
We derive general trade-off relations among the power, efficiency, and constancy for two-terminal thermoelectric systems in the linear response regime. Constancy, which quantifies the steadiness of the heat engine, is measured by its…
A dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
The second law of thermodynamics constrains that the efficiency of heat engines, classical or quantum, cannot be greater than the universal Carnot efficiency. We discover another bound for the efficiency of a quantum Otto heat engine…
Fluctuation theorems impose constraints on possible work extraction probabilities in thermodynamical processes. These constraints are stronger than the usual second law, which is concerned only with average values. Here, we show that such…
Recent predictions for quantum-mechanical enhancements in the operation of small heat engines have raised renewed interest in their study from both a fundamental perspective and in view of applications. One essential question is whether…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
We derive a general quantum exchange fluctuation theorem for multipartite systems with arbitrary coupling strengths by taking into account the informational contribution of the back-action of the quantum measurements, which contributes to…
The formulation of the First and Second Principles of thermodynamics for a particle in contact with a heat bath and submitted to an external force is analyzed, by means of the Boltzmann-Lorentz kinetic equation. The possible definitions of…
The experimental verification of the fluctuation theorem by Wang et al. is explained in terms of a simple Langevin dynamics. This implies that the entropy consuming trajectories found by Wang et al. are fluctuations generated by a random…
The fluctuation theorems have remained one of the cornerstones in the study of systems that are driven far out of equilibrium, and they provide strong constraints on the fraction of trajectories that behave atypically in light of the second…
We present the stochastic thermodynamics analysis of an open quantum system weakly coupled to multiple reservoirs and driven by a rapidly oscillating external field. The analysis is built on a modified stochastic master equation in the…
A central building block of a heat engine is the working fluid, which mediates the conversion of heat into work. In nanoscale heat engines, the working fluid can be a quantum system whose behavior and dynamics are non-classical. A…