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Low-temperature-differential (LTD) Stirling heat engines are able to operate with a small temperature difference between low-temperature heat reservoirs that exist in our daily lives, and thus they are considered to be an important…
Brownian motors, i.e. devices able to produce useful work out of thermal forces with the help of other unbiased forces, provide an ideal benchmark for the investigation of quantum dissipative systems, for two reasons. First, the interaction…
Stochastic heat engines are devices that generate work from random thermal motion using a small number of highly fluctuating degrees of freedom. Proposals for such devices have existed for more than a century and include the Maxwell demon…
We report the study of a new experimental granular Brownian motor, inspired to the one published in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 248001 (2010)], but different in some ingredients. As in that previous work, the motor is constituted by a rotating…
Periodic driving is used to operate machines that go from standard macroscopic engines to small non-equilibrium micro-sized systems. Two classes of such systems are small heat engines driven by periodic temperature variations and molecular…
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
Starting from a microscopic approach and using the formalism of quantum Brownian motion, partition function of a system composed of two separated pieces of anisotropic matter and a fluctuating medium in finite temperature is obtained…
In striking contrast to equilibrium systems, inertia can profoundly alter the structure of active systems. Here, we demonstrate that driven systems can exhibit effective equilibrium-like states with increasing particle inertia, despite…
Brownian particles interacting sequentially with distinct temperatures and driving forces at each stroke have been tackled as a reliable alternative for the construction of engine setups. However they can behave very inefficiently depending…
Understanding the role of inertia in nanoscale heat transport is fundamental to the design of efficient nano-thermodynamics systems. In this work, we experimentally address the non-equilibrium dynamics of a Brownian gyrator, a paradigmatic…
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…
A colloidal particle embedded in a fluid can be used as a microscopic heat engine by means of a sequence of cyclic transformations imposed by an optical trap. We investigate a model for the operation of such kind of Brownian engines when…
Brownian vortexes are stochastic machines that use static non-conservative force fields to bias random thermal fluctuations into steadily circulating currents. The archetype for this class of systems is a colloidal sphere in an optical…
According to the laws of thermodynamics, no heat engine can beat the efficiency of a Carnot cycle. This efficiency traditionally comes with vanishing power output and practical designs, optimized for power, generally achieve far less.…
Artificial micro heat engines are prototypical models to explore and elucidate the mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1-2]. Micro heat engines realized hitherto mimicked their macroscopic…
We consider a model of a two-dimensional molecular machine - called Brownian gyrator - that consists of two coordinates coupled to each other and to separate heat baths at temperatures respectively $T_x$ and $T_y$. We consider the limit in…
A particle diffusing around a point of stable mechanical equilibrium in a static but non-conservative force field enters into a steady state characterized by circulation in the probability flux. Circulation in such a Brownian vortex is not…
We show that the correlated stochastic fluctuation of the friction coefficient can give rise to long-range directional motion of a particle undergoing Brownian random walk in a constant periodic energy potential landscape. The occurrence of…
A microscopic model for a translational Brownian motor, dubbed as Brownian Translator, is introduced. It is inspired by the Brownian Gyrator of Filliger and Reimann (Filliger and Reimann 2007). The Brownian Translator consists of a…
Brownian particles placed sequentially in contact with distinct thermal reservoirs and subjected to external driving forces are promising candidates for the construction of reliable thermal engines. In this contribution, we address the role…