Related papers: Second law for active heat engines
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…
We reformulate stochastic thermodynamics in terms of noise realizations for Langevin systems in contact with multiple reservoirs and investigated the structure of the second laws of thermodynamics. We derive a hierarchy of fluctuation…
We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
We want to understand whether and to which extent the maximal (Carnot) efficiency for heat engines can be reached at a finite power. To this end we generalize the Carnot cycle so that it is not restricted to slow processes. We show that for…
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the…
A stopping time $T$ is the first time when a trajectory of a stochastic process satisfies a specific criterion. In this paper, we use martingale theory to derive the integral fluctuation relation $\langle e^{-S_{\rm tot}(T)}\rangle=1$ for…
The optimal efficiency of quantum (or classical) heat engines whose heat baths are $n$-particle systems is given by the information geometry and the strong large deviation. We give the optimal work extraction process as a concrete…
We discuss the efficiency of a heat engine operating in a nonequilibrium steady state maintained by two heat reservoirs. Within the general framework of linear irreversible thermodynamics we derive a universal upper bound on the efficiency…
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…
We obtain generalizations of the Kelvin-Planck, Clausius, and Carnot statements of the second law of thermodynamics, for situations involving information processing. To this end, we consider an information reservoir (representing, e.g. a…
Optimisation of heat engines at the micro-scale has applications in biological and artificial nano-technology, and stimulates theoretical research in non-equilibrium statistical physics. Here we consider non-interacting overdamped particles…
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 study a class of cyclic Brownian heat engines in the framework of finite-time thermodynamics. For infinitely long cycle times, the engine works at the Carnot efficiency limit producing, however, zero power. For the efficiency at maximum…
We introduce a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems, the simplest of quantum mechanical systems, undergoing quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths, respectively, at…
Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…
The second law of thermodynamics for adiabatic operations -- constraints on state transitions in closed systems under external control -- is one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics. On the other hand, it is recently established…
We derive a bound on the efficiency of thermal engines that can be sharper than Carnot's limit. It is a function of statistical correlations between the engine internal state and Hamiltonian, can be saturated even in finite-time cycles, and…
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…
We study the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of a heat engine operating between two finite-sized reservoirs with well-defined temperatures. Within the linear response regime, it is found that the uniform temperature of the two reservoirs at…