Related papers: Thermodynamic performance bounds for radiative hea…
Enhancing the radiative interaction between quantum electronic transitions is of general interest. There are two important properties of radiative interaction: the range and the strength. There has been a trade-off between the range and the…
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…
This paper concludes a three-Part series on the limits the laws of physics place on the sustained performance of reversible computers. Part I concerned aggregate performance in terms of computational operations per unit time, but neglected…
Heat engines and information engines have each historically served as motivating examples for the development of thermodynamics. While these two types of systems are typically thought of as two separate kinds of machines, recent empirical…
Mesoscopic thermoelectric heat engine is much anticipated as a device that allows us to utilize with high efficiency wasted heat inaccessible by conventional heat engines. However, the derivation of the heat current in this engine seems to…
A heat engine is a machine which uses the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir to extract work. Here both reservoirs are quantum systems and a heat engine is described by a unitary transformation which decreases the…
We investigate maximum efficiency at a given power for low-dissipation heat engines. Close to maximum power, the maximum gain in efficiency scales as a square root of relative loss in power and this scaling is universal for a broad class of…
A pair of systems at different temperatures is a classic environment for a heat engine, which produces work during the relaxation to a common equilibrium. It is generally believed that a direct interaction between the two systems will…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
We analyse the process of conversion of near-field thermal radiation into usable work by considering the radiation emitted between two planar sources supporting surface phonon-polaritons. The maximum work flux that can be extracted from the…
We study the efficiency at maximum power of two coupled heat engines, using thermoelectric generators (TEGs) as engines. Assuming that the heat and electric charge fluxes in the TEGs are strongly coupled, we simulate numerically the…
We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…
Thermodynamic uncertainty relation, quantifying a trade-off among average current, the associated fluctuation (precision), and entropy production (cost), has been formulated in nonequilibrium steady state and various stochastic systems.…
The quest for good thermoelectric materials and/or high-efficiency thermoelectric devices is of primary importance from theoretical and practical points of view. Low-dimensional structures with quantum dots or molecules are promising…
The wave-like nature of electrons leads to the existence of upper bounds on the thermoelectric response of nanostructured devices [R. S. Whitney, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 130601 (2014); Phys. Rev. B 91, 115425 (2015)]. This fundamental result,…
We model a microscopic heat engine as a particle hopping on a one-dimensional lattice in a periodic sawtooth potential, with or without load, assisted by the thermal kicks it gets from alternately placed hot and cold thermal baths. We find…
We consider a relativistic quantum heat engine that goes through a thermodynamical cycle consisting of stages involving laser-assisted cooling of electrons and the generation of Xray radiation. Quantum treatment of the processes makes it…
A theoretical thermodynamic cycle more efficient than an infinite set of Carnot engines is presented. This result is unexpected from the point of view of classical thermodynamics.
A thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy converter harnesses thermal photons emitted by a hot body and converts them to electricity. When the radiative heat exchange between the emitter and PV cell is spectrally monochromatic, the TPV system can…
We investigate the dynamics and thermodynamics of a framework composed of interacting units in which parameters (temperatures and energies) assume distinct values due to the contact with distinct (cold and hot) thermal reservoirs. The…