相关论文: What limits photosynthesis? Identifying the thermo…

Monitoring the evolution of the anthropogenic light emissions is a priority task in light pollution research. Among the complementary approaches that can be adopted to achieve this goal stand out those based on measuring the direct radiance…

Small, out-of-equilibrium, and quantum systems defy simple thermodynamic expressions. Such systems are exemplified by molecular switches, which exchange heat with a bath. These molecules can photoisomerize, or change conformation, or…

The overall process of photosynthesis consists of two main phases, the so-called light and dark eactions: light energy is absorbed by chlorophyll molecules and transferred to regenerate NADH and ATP, then drive Calvin-Benson cycle to…

The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…

Once carbon emission neutrality and other sustainability goals have been achieved, a widespread assumption is that economic growth at current rates can be sustained beyond the 21st century. However, even if we achieve these goals, this…

Gas planets in close proximity to their host stars experience photoevaporative mass loss. The energy-limited escape concept is generally used to derive estimates for the planetary mass-loss rates. Our photoionization hydrodynamics…

We review the thermal history of the Universe. We obtain a new estimate for the thermal history of the Earth over the past four billion years using a biological thermometer based on (1) a rough estimate of the absolute time calibration of…

Future generations of photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation must employ inexpensive, earth-abundant absorber materials in order to provide a large-scale source of clean energy. These materials tend to have poor electrical transport…

We show that the maximum work that can be obtained from the thermal radiation emitted between two planar sources in the near-field regime is much larger than that corresponding to the blackbody limit. This quantity as well as an upper bound…

Because the solar luminosity increases over geological timescales, Earth climate is expected to warm, increasing water evaporation which, in turn, enhances the atmospheric greenhouse effect. Above a certain critical insolation, this…

Frequency up-conversion of few low-energy photons into a single high-energy photon, greatly contributes to imaging, light sources, detection and other fields of research. However, it offers negligible efficiency when up-converting many…

An old conceptual physics-based back-of-the-envelope model for greenhouse effect is revisited and validated against state-of-the-art reanalyses. Untraditional diagnostics show a physically consistent picture, for which the state of earth's…

During the first steps of photosynthesis, the energy of impinging solar photons is transformed into electronic excitation energy of the light-harvesting biomolecular complexes. The subsequent energy transfer to the reaction center is…

We extend the analysis of the thermodynamics of the climate system by investigating the role played by processes taking place at various spatial and temporal scales through a procedure of coarse graining. The coarser is the graining of the…

We investigate the abiotic production of oxygen and its photochemical byproduct ozone through water vapor photolysis in moist atmospheres of temperate terrestrial exoplanets. The amount of water vapor available for photolysis in the middle…

Substantial grounds exist to doubt the universal validity of the Newtonian Paradigm that requires a pre-stated, fixed phase space. Therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stated only for fixed phase spaces, is also in doubt. The…

We use a new Atmospheric Chemistry and Energetics one-dimensional (ACE1D) thermospheric model to show that the energies deposited by the solar soft x-rays in the lower thermosphere at altitudes between 100 -150 km (Bailey et al. 2000),…

Photons excited into ground state modes at finite temperature display partitioning among photon phases, lifetimes and distances travelled since creation. These distributions set the distance from an interface a created photon has some…

The second law of thermodynamics uses change in free energy of macroscopic systems to set a bound on performed work. Ergotropy plays a similar role in microscopic scenarios, and is defined as the maximum amount of energy that can be…

The photosystem II reaction centre is the photosynthetic complex responsible for oxygen production on Earth. Its water splitting function is particularly favoured by the formation of a stable charge separated state via a pathway that starts…