相关论文: Increasing thermoelectric efficiency towards the C…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
A short introduction on quantum thermodynamics is given and three new topics are discussed: 1) Maximal work extraction from a finite quantum system. The thermodynamic prediction fails and a new, general result is derived, the ``ergotropy''.…
We derive the efficiency at maximal power of a scale-invariant (critical) quantum junction in exact form. Both Fermi and Bose statistics are considered. We show that time-reversal invariance is spontaneously broken. For fermions we…
Several models of thermionic energy nanoconverters have been proposed to study the transport phenomena that take place in electronic devices. For example, in resonant tunneling junctions those phenomena are manifested through the…
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 investigate the thermoelectric performance of minimally nonlinear irreversible heat engines with broken time-reversal symmetry (TRS), realized through voltage and voltage-temperature probe configurations. Our framework extends the…
Mesoscopic thermoelectric heat engine is much anticipated as a device that allows us to utilize with high efficiency wasted heat inaccessible by conventional heat engines. However, the derivation of the heat current in this engine seems to…
We propose experimental protocols to reveal thermoelectric and thermal effects in the transport properties of ultracold fermionic atoms, using the two-terminal setup recently realized at ETH. We show in particular that, for two reservoirs…
We investigate the transport through a nanoscale device consisting of a degenerate double-orbital Anderson dot coupled to two uncorrelated leads. We determine the thermoelectric transport properties close to the one-electron regime and…
Low-dimensional systems with sharp features in the density of states have been proposed as a means to improving the efficiency of thermoelectric devices. Quantum dot systems, which offer the sharpest density of states achievable, however,…
The Q-cycle mechanism entering the electron and proton transport chain in oxygenic photosynthesis is an example of how biological processes can be efficiently investigated with elementary microscopic models. Here we address the problem of…
We analyse a device aimed at the conversion of heat into electrical energy, based on a closed cycle in which a distiller generates two solutions at different concentrations, and an electrochemical cell consumes the concentration difference,…
A thermodynamic framework that predicts the thermal conductivity $\lambda$ of simple fluids beyond the dilute-gas limit is introduced. By generalizing the transition-rate approach of particles on a lattice to conserved quantities in…
We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…
We study a refrigerator model which consists of two $n$-level systems interacting via a pulsed external field. Each system couples to its own thermal bath at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$, respectively ($\theta\equiv T_c/T_h<1$). 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…
A unified view on macroscopic thermodynamics and quantum transport is presented. Thermodynamic processes with an exchange of energy between two systems necessarily involve the flow of other balanceable quantities. These flows are first…
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…
We investigate a multiterminal mesoscopic conductor in the quantum Hall regime, subject to temperature and voltage biases. The device can be considered as a nonequilibrium resource acting on a working substance. We previously showed that…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…