相关论文: Stochastic pumping of heat: Approaching the Carnot…

The Carnot cycle imposes a fundamental upper limit to the efficiency of a macroscopic motor operating between two thermal baths. However, this bound needs to be reinterpreted at microscopic scales, where molecular bio-motors and some…

We discuss the possibility of reaching the Carnot efficiency by heat engines (HEs) out of quasi-static conditions at nonzero power output. We focus on several models widely used to describe the performance of actual HEs. These models…

We introduce heat engines working in the nano-regime that allow to extract a finite amount of deterministic work. We show that the efficiency of these cycles is strictly smaller than Carnot's, and we associate this difference with a…

The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…

We present a detailed study of a Brownian particle driven by Carnot-type refrigerating protocol operating between two thermal baths. Both the underdamped as well as the overdamped limits are investigated. The particle is in a harmonic…

We demonstrate that the system composed of a gyrotropic particle out of thermal equilibrium with vacuum can be regarded as a heat engine. Such a particle, initially at rest, will experience a fluctuation-induced torque and start to rotate,…

According to Thermodynamics, the efficiency of a heat engine is upper bounded by Carnot efficiency. For macroscopic systems, the Carnot efficiency is, however, achieved only for quasi static processes. And, considerable attention has been…

We analyze the efficiency fluctuations of a coherent quantum heat engine coupled to a unimodal cavity using a standard full-counting statistics procedure. The engine's most likely efficiency obtained by computing the large-deviation…

The widely debated feasibility of thermodynamic machines achieving Carnot efficiency at finite power has been convincingly dismissed. Yet, the common wisdom that efficiency can only be optimal in the limit of infinitely-slow processes…

We investigate fluctuations of output work for a class of Stirling heat engines with working fluid composed of interacting units and compare these fluctuations to an average work output. In particular, we focus on engine performance close…

We discuss the effect of subdividing the ratchet potential on the performance of a tiny Brownian heat engine that is modeled as a Brownian particle hopping in a viscous medium in a sawtooth potential (with or without load) assisted by…

Heat engines constitute the major building blocks of modern technologies. However, conventional heat engines with higher power yield lesser efficiency and vice versa and respect various power-efficiency trade-off relations. This is also…

Stochastic heating is a well-known mechanism through which magnetized particles may be energized by low-frequency electromagnetic waves. In its simplest version, under spatially homogeneous conditions, it is known to be operative only above…

We present a theoretical study showing that an optically driven excitonic two-level system in a solid state environment acts as a heat pump by means of repeated phonon emission or absorption events. We derive a master equation for the…

The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…

The recently established connection between stochastic thermodynamics and fluctuating hydrodynamics is applied to a study of efficiencies in the coupled transport of heat and matter on a small scale. A stochastic model for a mesoscopic cell…

In this work, we analyze an Otto-type cycle operating with a working substance composed of a quantum harmonic oscillator (QHO). Unlike other studies in which the work extraction is done by varying the frequency of the QHO and letting it…

We present a simple kinematic model of a non-equilibrium steady state device, which can operate either as a heat engine or as a refrigerator. The model is composed of two or more scattering channels where the motion is fully described by…

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 discuss the statistical correlation properties of currents and energy flows generated by an adiabatic quantum pump. Our approach emphasizes the important role of quantized energy exchange between the sea of electrons and the oscillating…