Heat engine driven by photon tunneling in many-body systems
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2015-07-08 v2 Statistical Mechanics
Optics
Abstract
Near-field heat engines are devices that convert the evanescent thermal field supported by a primary source into usable mechanical energy. By analyzing the thermodynamic performance of three-body near-field heat engines, we demonstrate that the power they supply can be substantially larger than that of two-body systems, showing their strong potential for energy harvesting. Theoretical limits for energy and entropy fluxes in three-body systems are discussed and compared with their corresponding two-body counterparts. Such considerations confirm that the thermodynamic availability in energy-conversion processes driven by three-body photon tunneling can exceed the thermodynamic availability in two-body systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.00912,
title = {Heat engine driven by photon tunneling in many-body systems},
author = {Ivan Latella and Agustín Pérez-Madrid and J. Miguel Rubi and Svend-Age Biehs and Philippe Ben-Abdallah},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.00912},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures