Related papers: Cyclic active refrigerators
Several studies have combined heat and gravitational energy exchanges to create novel heat engines. A common theoretical framework is developed here to describe thermogravitational cycles which have the same efficiencies as the Carnot,…
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 study coupled quantum systems as the working media of thermodynamic machines. Under a suitable phase-space transformation, the coupled systems can be expressed as a composition of independent subsystems. We find that for the coupled…
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
Microorganisms such as bacteria are active matters which consume chemical energy and generate their unique run-and-tumble motion. A swarm of such microorganisms provide a nonequilibrium active environment whose noise characteristics are…
At the very foundation of the second law of thermodynamics lies the fact that no heat engine operating between two reservoires of temperatures $T_C\leq T_H$ can overperform the ideal Carnot engine: $\langle W \rangle / \langle Q_H \rangle…
Nuclear power plants are prominent examples of heat-to-work conversion systems, and optimizing their thermodynamic performance offers significant potential for enhancing energy efficiency. With a development history of less than a century,…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
Steady-state quantum thermal machines are typically characterized by a continuous flow of heat between different reservoirs. However, at the level of discrete stochastic realizations, heat flow is unraveled as a series of abrupt quantum…
We have performed an extensive analysis of a single particle stochastic heat engine constructed by manipulating a Brownian particle in a time dependent harmonic potential. The cycle consists of two isothermal steps at different temperatures…
Local master equations are a widespread tool to model open quantum systems, especially in the context of many-body systems. These equations, however, are believed to lead to thermodynamic anomalies and violation of the laws of…
This work obtains the efficiency at maximum power for a stochastic heat engine performing Carnot-like, Stirling-like and Ericsson-like cycles. For the mesoscopic engine a Brownian particle trapped by an optical tweezers is considered. The…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
The pursuit of achieving the maximum power in microscopic thermal engines has gained increasing attention in recent studies of stochastic thermodynamics. We employ the optimal control theory to study the performance of Brownian heat engines…
We provide a consistent thermodynamic analysis of stochastic thermal engines driven by finite-size reservoirs, which are in turn coupled to infinite-size reservoirs. We consider a cyclic operation mode, where the working medium couples…
We apply the concept of a frequency-dependent effective temperature based on the fluctuation-dissipation ratio to a driven Brownian particle in a nonequilibrium steady state. Using this system as a thermostat for a weakly coupled harmonic…
Using a thermodynamically consistent, mesoscopic model for modern complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors, we study an array of logical circuits and explore how their function is constrained by recent thermodynamic uncertainty…
Some analogies between different nonequilibrium heat conduction models, particularly, random walk, discrete variable model, and Boltzmann transport equation with the single relaxation time approximation, have been discussed. We show that…
The performance characteristics of a heat rectifier and a heat pump are studied in a non Markovian framework. The device is constructed from a molecule connected to a hot and cold reservoir. The heat baths are modelled using the stochastic…
Various quantum systems are considered as the working substance for the analysis of quantum heat cycles and quantum refrigerators. The ongoing technological challenge is how efficiently can a heat engine convert thermal energy to mechanical…