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Modeling quantum thermal machines provides a practical approach to describing the thermodynamic properties of quantum technologies and devices. For this purpose, power-law potentials are often employed as working mediums of quantum…
Quantum heat machines, encompassing heat engines, refrigerators, heaters, and accelerators, represent the forefront of quantum thermodynamics, offering a novel paradigm for converting heat energy into useful mechanical work. Leveraging…
Theoretical treatments of periodically-driven quantum thermal machines (PD-QTMs) are largely focused on the limit-cycle stage of operation characterized by a periodic state of the system. Yet, this regime is not immediately accessible for…
This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…
Conventional continuous quantum heat engines with incoherent heat transfer perform poorly as they exploit two-body interactions between the system and hot or cold baths, thus having limited capability to outperform their classical…
Quantum heat engines (QHE) are thermal machines where the working substance is quantum. In the extreme case the working medium can be a single particle or a few level quantum system. The study of QHE has shown a remarkable similarity 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.…
A dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
We adopt a geometric approach to describe the performance of adiabatic quantum machines, operating under slow time-dependent driving and in contact to two or more reservoirs with a temperature bias during all the cycle. We show that the…
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…
We investigate the efficiency at maximum power (EMP) of irreversible quantum Carnot engines that perform finite-time cycles between two temperature tunable baths. The temperature form we adopt can be experimentally realized in squeezed…
We present a mechanism for efficiency increase in quantum heat engines containing internal energy levels that do not couple to the external work sink. The gain is achieved by using these levels to channel heat in a direction opposite to the…
The stochastic efficiency [G. Verley et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 4721 (2014)] was introduced to evaluate the performance of energy-conversion machines in micro-scale. However, such an efficiency generally diverges when no heat is absorbed while…
Quantum many-body systems present substantial technical challenges from both analytical and numerical perspectives. Despite these difficulties, some progress has been made, including studies of interacting atomic gases and interacting…
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…
Since its inception about two centuries ago thermodynamics has sparkled continuous interest and fundamental questions. According to the second law no heat engine can have an efficiency larger than Carnot's efficiency. The latter can be…
We present a unified perspective on nonequilibrium heat engines by generalizing nonlinear irreversible thermodynamics. For tight-coupling heat engines, a generic constitutive relation of nonlinear response accurate up to the quadratic order…
We introduce a universal scheme to divide the power output of a periodically driven quantum heat engine into a classical contribution and one stemming solely from quantum coherence. Specializing to Lindblad-dynamics and small driving…
Energy is often partitioned into heat and work by two independent paths corresponding to the change in the eigenenergies or the probability distributions of a quantum system. The discrepancies of the heat and work for various quantum…
We show that finite system-reservoir coupling imposes a distinct quantum limit on the performance of a non-equilibrium quantum heat engine. Even in the absence of quantum friction along the isentropic strokes, finite system-reservoir…