Related papers: A Minimal Model for Carnot Efficiency at Maximum P…
Quantum coherence has been demonstrated in various systems including organic solar cells and solid state devices. In this letter, we report the lower and upper bounds for the performance of quantum heat engines determined by the efficiency…
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…
A suitable way of quantifying work for microscopic quantum systems has been constantly debated in the field of quantum thermodynamics. One natural approach is to measure the average increase in energy of an ancillary system, called the…
The efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound. This bound follows from the second law of thermodynamics and is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the…
Recent advances in experimental control of colloidal systems have spurred a revolution in the production of mesoscale thermodynamic devices. Functional "textbook" engines, such as the Stirling and Carnot cycles, have been produced in…
Collective effects have attracted remarkable recent interest, not only for their presence in several systems in nature but also for the possibility of being used for the construction of efficient engine setups. Notwithstanding, little is…
In 1975, Courzon and Ahlborn studied a Carnot engine with thermal losses and got an expression for its efficiency that described better the performance of actual heat machines than the traditional result due to Carnot. In their original…
Continuous particle exchange thermal machines require no time-dependent driving, can be realised in solid-state electronic devices, and miniaturised to nanometre scale. Quantum dots, providing a narrow energy filter and allowing to…
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…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
We study the stochastic energetic exchanges in quantum heat engines. Due to microreversibility, these obey a fluctuation relation, called the heat engine fluctuation relation, which implies the Carnot bound: no machine can have an…
We investigate the performance of an underdamped stochastic heat engine for a time-dependent harmonic oscillator. We analytically determine the optimal protocol that maximizes the efficiency at fixed power. The maximum efficiency reduces to…
The context of the present paper is stochastic thermodynamics - an approach to nonequilibrium thermodynamics rooted within the broader framework of stochastic control. In contrast to the classical paradigm of Carnot engines, we herein…
We investigate the thermodynamic efficiency of sub-micro-scale heat engines operating under the conditions described by over-damped stochastic thermodynamics. We prove that at maximum power the efficiency obeys for constant isotropic…
Stochastic thermodynamics has revolutionized our understanding of heat engines operating in finite time. Recently, numerous studies have considered the optimal operation of thermodynamic cycles acting as heat engines with a given profile in…
Combining two disparate lines of thought like thermodynamics and quantum mechanics yields surprising results. The resulting idea of quantum thermodynamic engines holds promise for harvesting novel sources of energy of purely quantum origin,…
It was reported that, if and only if the specific heat, correlation length, and dynamical exponents $\alpha, \nu$ and $z$, fulfill the condition $\alpha-z\nu>0$, the phase transitions can enable a quantum heat engine to approach Carnot…
The efficiency of an heat engine is traditionally defined as the ratio of its average output work over its average input heat. Its highest possible value was discovered by Carnot in 1824 and is a cornerstone concept in thermodynamics. It…
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…
We formulate the power-efficiency constraint of Carnot-like heat engines as a geometric optimization problem in the plane of normalized branch dissipations. Efficiency contours are straight lines in this plane, so maximizing efficiency at…