Related papers: Characterizing the performance of heat rectifiers
We argue that thermal machines can be understood from the perspective of `virtual qubits' at `virtual temperatures': The relevant way to view the two heat baths which drive a thermal machine is as a composite system. Virtual qubits are…
Isothermal transformations are minimally dissipative but slow processes, as the system needs to remain close to thermal equilibrium along the protocol. Here, we show that smoothly modifying the system-bath interaction can significantly…
Biological processes such as DNA replication, RNA transcription, and protein translation show remarkable speed and accuracy in selecting the right substrate from pools of chemically identical molecules. This result is obtained by…
The three-terminal heat device consisting of a cavity and coupled to a heat bath is established. By tuning the temperatures of the electrodes and the phonon bath, the device can function as a heat engine or a refrigerator. We study the…
We study heat transfer between conductors, mediated by the excitation of a monomodal harmonic oscillator. Using a simple model, we show that the onset of rectification in the system is directly related to the nonlinearity of the electron…
Josephson tunnel junctions are proposed as efficient phase-tunable thermal rectifiers. The latter exploit the strong temperature dependence of the superconducting density of states and phase-dependence of heat currents flowing through…
A unified $\chi$-criterion for heat devices (including heat engines and refrigerators) which is defined as the product of the energy conversion efficiency and the heat absorbed per unit time by the working substance [de Tom\'{a}s \emph{et…
We address a fundamental problem for the advance of phononics: the search of a feasible thermal diode. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence of thermal rectification in general graded materials. By starting from simple…
We report on a quantum thermodynamic method to purify a qubit on a quantum processing unit (QPU) equipped with (nearly) identical qubits. Our starting point is a three qubit design that emulates the well known two qubit swap engine. Similar…
We establish a theory of optimal efficiency and power for three-terminal thermoelectric engines which have two independent output electric currents and one input heat current. This set-up goes beyond the conventional heat engines with only…
We consider a system formed by two different segments of particles, coupled to thermal baths, one at each end, modeled by Langevin thermostats. The particles in each segment interact harmonically and are subject to an on-site potential, for…
Electrical current rectification is an interesting electronic feature, popularly known as a diode. Achieving a high rectification ratio in a molecular junction has been a long-standing goal in molecular electronics. The present work…
The derivation of general performance benchmarks is important in the design of highly optimized heat engines and refrigerators. To obtain them, one may model phenomenologically the leading sources of irreversibility ending up with results…
There is a current interest in quantum thermodynamics in the context of open quantum systems. An important issue is the consistency of quantum thermodynamics, in particular the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., the flow of heat from a hot…
For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…
We demonstrate that a three-terminal harmonic symmetric chain in the presence of a Coriolis force, produced by a rotating platform which is used to place the chain, can produce thermal rectification. The direction of heat flow is…
Quantum-dot systems serve as nanoscale heat engines exploiting thermal fluctuations to perform a useful task. Here, we investigate a multi-terminal triple-dot system, operating as a refrigerator that extracts heat from a cold electronic…
We study a refrigerator model which consists of two $n$-level systems interacting via a pulsed external field. Each system couples to its own thermal bath at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively ($\theta\equiv T_c/T_h<1$). The…
Brownian heat engines use local temperature gradients in asymmetric potentials to move particles against an external force. The energy efficiency of such machines is generally limited by irreversible heat flow carried by particles that make…
Harmonic oscillator chains connecting two harmonic reservoirs at different constant temperatures cannot act as thermal diodes, irrespective of structural asymmetry. However, here we prove that perfectly harmonic junctions can rectify heat…