Related papers: Thermodynamic performance bounds for radiative hea…
We introduce heat engines working in the nano-regime that allow to extract a finite amount of deterministic work. We show that the efficiency of these cycles is strictly smaller than Carnot's, and we associate this difference with a…
Information can improve heat engine performance, but the underlying principles are still not so clear. Here we introduce a Carnot information machine (CIE) and obtain a quantitative relationship between the engine performance and…
In the past, a number of heat engine models have been devised to apply the principles of thermodynamics to a laser. The best one known is the model using a negative temperature to describe population inversion. In this paper, we present a…
Characterizing and optimizing nanoscopic heat engines require an appropriate understanding of the interplay between power, efficiency, entropy production and fluctuations. Despite significant recent advancements, including linear stochastic…
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…
While externally driven information engines are well understood, the thermodynamic constraints of their autonomous counterparts remain an open question. Here, we investigate the finite-time operation of an autonomous machine functioning as…
Based on quantum thermodynamic processes, we make a quantum-mechanical (QM) extension of the typical heat engine cycles, such as the Carnot, Brayton, Otto, and Diesel cycles, etc. The temperature is not included in these QM engine cycles,…
We present a detailed thermodynamic analysis of a three-level quantum heat engine coupled continuously to hot and cold reservoirs. The system is driven by an oscillating external field and is described by the Markovian quantum master…
We propose a solar thermal energy conversion system consisting of a solar absorber, a thermoradiative cell or negative illumination photodiode, and a photovoltaic cell. Because it is a heat engine, this system can also be paired with…
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.…
Conventional thermionic power generators and refrigerators utilize a barrier in the direction of transport to selectively transmit high-energy electrons. Here we show that the energy spectrum of electrons transmitted in this way is not…
We consider a photo--Carnot engine that consists of a single--mode radiation field in an optical cavity. One the heat reservoirs is made of a beam of thermally entangled pairs of two--level atoms that interact resonantly with the cavity. We…
In a previous paper \cite{MTAY1} we have shown that Newton'n third law cannot strictly hold in a distributed system of which the different parts are at a finite distance from each other. This is due to the finite speed of signal propagation…
The possibility of utilizing quantum effects to enhance the performance of quantum heat engines has been an active topic of research, but how to enhance the performance by optimizing the engine parameters needs to be further studied. In…
The full optimization of a quantum heat engine requires operating at high power, high efficiency, and high stability (i.e. low power fluctuations). However, these three objectives cannot be simultaneously optimized - as indicated by the…
The difference between quantum isoenergetic process and quantum isothermal process comes from the violation of the law of equipartition of energy in the quantum regime. To reveal an important physical meaning of this fact, here we study a…
We define the heat capacity for steady periodically driven systems and as an example we compute it for dissipative two-level systems where the energy gap is time-modulated. There, as a function of ambient temperature, the Schottky peak…
In this work, we present expressions for radiative heat transfer between pairs of spheres in a linear chain and between individual spheres and their environment. The expressions are valid for coated spheres of arbitrary size, spacing, and…
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…
Thermal machines perform useful tasks--such as producing work, cooling, or heating--by exchanging energy, and possibly additional conserved quantities such as particles, with reservoirs. Here we consider thermal machines that perform more…