Related papers: Quantum, cyclic and particle-exchange heat engines
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.…
We investigate theoretically a quantum optomechanical realization of a heat engine. In a generic optomechanical arrangement the optomechanical coupling between the cavity field and the oscillating end-mirror results in polariton normal mode…
A quantum thermal machine is an open quantum system coupled to hot and cold thermal baths. Thus, its dynamics can be well understood using the concepts and tools from non-Hermitian quantum systems. A hallmark of non-Hermiticity is the…
We define a kind of heat engine via three-dimensional charged BTZ black holes. This case is quite subtle and needs to be more careful. The heat flow along the isochores does not equal to zero since the specific heat $C_V\neq0$ and this…
We introduce a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems, the simplest of quantum mechanical systems, undergoing quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths, respectively, at…
The understanding of the underlying dynamical mechanisms which determine the macroscopic laws of heat conduction is a long standing task of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. A better understanding of the mechanism of heat conduction…
The minimal-coupling quantum heat engine is a thermal machine consisting of an explicit energy storage system, heat baths, and a working body, which alternatively couples to subsystems through discrete strokes -- energy-conserving two-body…
While strong system-bath coupling produces rich and interesting phenomena, applications to quantum thermal engines have been so far pointing mainly at detrimental effects. The delicate trade-off between efficiency loss due to strong…
We study the effect of Kerr nonlinearity in quantum thermal machines having a Kerr-nonlinear oscillator as working substance and operating under the ideal quantum Otto cycle. We first investigate the efficiency of a Kerr-nonlinear heat…
We study a four-stroke Otto engine whose working fluid is a quantum Ising chain. The thermodynamic cycle consists in sweeps of the transverse magnetic field occurring in thermal isolation, alternated by thermalisation strokes with…
For heat engines working between two heat baths, functionality is often conditioned on a set of fixed constraints such as given internal structure of the engine and given temperatures for the baths. It is, however, important to devise heat…
In a quantum Stirling heat engine, the heat exchanged with two thermal baths is partly utilized for performing work by redistributing the energy levels of the working substance. We analyze the thermodynamics of a quantum Stirling engine…
Carnot established in 1824 that the efficiency of cyclic engines operating between a hot bath at absolute temperature $T_{hot}$ and a bath at a lower temperature $T_{cold}$ cannot exceed $1-T_{cold}/T_{hot}$. We show that linear oscillators…
Incorporating time into thermodynamics allows addressing the tradeoff between efficiency and power. A qubit engine serves as a toy model to study this tradeoff from first principles, based on the quantum theory of open systems. We study the…
The Carnot cycle is a prototype of ideal heat engine to draw mechanical energy from the heat flux between two thermal baths with the maximum efficiency, dubbed as the Carnot efficiency $\eta_{\mathrm{C}}$. Such efficiency can only be…
A quantum Otto engine based on a three-dimensional harmonic oscillator is proposed. One of the modes of this oscillator functions as the working fluid, while the other two play the role of baths. The coupling between the working fluid and…
We develop a geometric framework to describe the thermodynamics of microscopic heat engines driven by slow periodic temperature variations and modulations of a mechanical control parameter. Covering both the classical and the quantum…
Quantum heat engines (QHEs) have attracted long-standing scientific interest, especially inspired by considerations of the interplay between heat and work with the quantization of energy levels, quantum superposition, and entanglement.…
Many-body-localized (MBL) systems do not thermalize under their intrinsic dynamics. The athermality of MBL, we propose, can be harnessed for thermodynamic tasks. We illustrate this ability by formulating an Otto engine cycle for a quantum…
We propose a quantum-enhanced heat engine with entanglement. The key feature of our scheme is superabsorption, which facilitates enhanced energy absorption by entangled qubits. Whereas a conventional engine with $N$ separable qubits…