Related papers: Fluctuations in heat engines
Stochastic thermodynamics as reviewed here systematically provides a framework for extending the notions of classical thermodynamics like work, heat and entropy production to the level of individual trajectories of well-defined…
Gibbs and Boltzmann definitions of temperature agree only in the macroscopic limit. The ambiguity in identifying the equilibrium temperature of a finite sized `small' system exchanging energy with a bath is usually understood as a…
Microscopic heat engines operate in regimes where thermodynamic quantities fluctuate strongly, making stochastic effects an essential aspect of their performance. However, existing geometric formulations of finite-time thermodynamics…
Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…
In a thermodynamical process, the dissipation or production of entropy can only be positive or zero according to the second law of thermodynamics. However the laws of thermodynamics are applicable to large systems in the thermodynamic…
The Carnot cycle imposes a fundamental upper limit to the efficiency of a macroscopic motor operating between two thermal baths. However, this bound needs to be reinterpreted at microscopic scales, where molecular bio-motors and some…
Electrical heat engines driven by the Johnson-Nyquist noise of resistors are introduced. They utilize Coulomb's law and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of statistical physics that is the reverse phenomenon of heat dissipation in a…
We generalize stochastic thermodynamics to include information reservoirs. Such information reservoirs, which can be modeled as a sequence of bits, modify the second law. For example, work extraction from a system in contact with a single…
A quantum-mechanical analog of the Carnot engine reversibly working at vanishing temperature, shortly termed the quantum-mechanical Carnot engine, is discussed. A general formula for the efficiency of such an engine with an arbitrary…
For processes during which a macroscopic system exchanges no heat with its surroundings, the second law of thermodynamics places two lower bounds on the amount of work performed on the system: a weak bound, expressed in terms of a…
The characteristic function for heat fluctuations in a non equilibrium system is characterised by a large deviation function whose symmetry gives rise to a fluctuation theorem. In equilibrium the large deviation function vanishes and the…
[...] By the beginning of the 20th century, the principles of thermodynamics were summarized into the so-called four laws, which were, as it turns out, definitive negative answers to the doomed quests for perpetual motion machines. As a…
Periodically driven many-body systems generally heat towards a featureless 'infinite-temperature' state. As an alternative to uniform heating in a clean system, here we establish a Floquet superheating regime, where fast heating nucleates…
We study energetic exchanges and fluctuations in two-stroke quantum thermodynamic engines where the working fluid is represented by two multilevel quantum systems, i.e. qudits, the heat flow is allowed by relaxation with two thermal…
Microcanonical Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics on one hand to closed finite and even small systems and on the other to the largest,self-gravitating ones. However, one has to reconsider the fundamental…
The efficiency of small thermal machines is typically a fluctuating quantity. We here study the efficiency large deviation function of two exemplary quantum heat engines, the harmonic oscillator and the two-level Otto cycles. While the…
We investigate thermodynamics of general nonequilibrium processes stopped at stochastic times. We propose a systematic strategy for constructing fluctuation-theorem-like martingales for each thermodynamic functional, yielding a family of…
Traditional thermodynamics governs the behaviour of large systems that evolve between states of thermal equilibrium. For these large systems, the mean values of thermodynamic quantities (such as work, heat and entropy) provide a good…
We study the ratio between the variances of work output and heat input, $\eta^{(2)}$, for a class of four-stroke heat engines which covers various typical cycles. Recent studies on the upper and lower bounds of $\eta^{(2)}$ are based on the…
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…