Related papers: A general efficiency relation for molecular machin…
Recently, a formal analogy between the fluctuating diffusivity and thermodynamics has been proposed based on phenomena of heterogeneous diffusion observed in living cells. This not only offers the analogs of the quantity of heat and work as…
The widely debated feasibility of thermodynamic machines achieving Carnot efficiency at finite power has been convincingly dismissed. Yet, the common wisdom that efficiency can only be optimal in the limit of infinitely-slow processes…
Information processing machines at the nanoscales are unavoidably affected by thermal fluctuations. Efficient design requires understanding how nanomachines can operate at minimal energy dissipation. In this letter we focus on mechanical…
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…
The efficiency statistics of a small thermodynamic machine has been recently investigated assuming that the total dissipation was a linear combination of two currents: the input and output currents. Here, we relax this standard assumption…
We investigate the model of "reversible ratchet" with interacting particles, introduced by us earlier [Europhys. Lett. 84, 50009 (2008)]. We further clarify the effect of efficiency enhancement due to interaction and show that it is of…
We analyse a device aimed at the conversion of heat into electrical energy, based on a closed cycle in which a distiller generates two solutions at different concentrations, and an electrochemical cell consumes the concentration difference,…
The performance of nano-scale energy conversion devices is studied in the framework of state-space models where a device is described by a graph comprising states and transitions between them represented by nodes and links, respectively.…
The theoretical and experimental study of energy transfer in photosynthesis has revealed an interesting transport regime, which lies at the borderline between classical transport dynamics and quantum-mechanical interference effects.…
Can a micron sized sack of interacting molecules understand, and adapt to a constantly-fluctuating environment? Cellular life provides an existence proof in the affirmative, but the principles that allow for life's existence are far from…
The energy dissipated by a living organism is commonly identified with heat generation. However, as cells exchange metabolites with their environment they also dissipate energy in the form of chemical entropy. How dissipation is distributed…
Transport networks are typically optimized, either by evolutionary pressures in biological systems or by human design in engineered structures. In the case of systems such as the animal vasculature, the transport of fluids is hindered by…
We study the efficiency fluctuations of a stochastic heat engine made of $N$ interacting unicyclic machines and undergoing a phase transition in the macroscopic limit. Depending on $N$ and on the observation time, the machine can explore…
Recent experiments reveal both passive subdiffusion of various nanoparticles and anomalous active transport of such particles by molecular motors in the molecularly crowded environment of living biological cells. Passive and active…
Optimization of cyclic stochastic heat engines, a topic spanning decades of research, commonly assumes fixed control or response parameters at discrete points in the cycle-a limitation that often leads to experimentally impractical…
We analyze the efficiency fluctuations of a coherent quantum heat engine coupled to a unimodal cavity using a standard full-counting statistics procedure. The engine's most likely efficiency obtained by computing the large-deviation…
Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…
There are many exotic thermodynamic processes that are hard to study in nature. Here, we synthesize a structured environment to explore the extremes of thermodynamics. We present an engine running at extreme temperatures of above ten…
Enzymes are nano-scale machines that have evolved to drive chemical reactions out of equilibrium in the right place at the right time. Given the complexity and specificity of enzymatic function, bottom-up design of enzymes presents a…
We consider quantum heat engines that operate between nonequilibrium stationary reservoirs. We evaluate their maximum efficiency from the positivity of the entropy production and show that it can be expressed in terms of an effective…