Quantum mechanical Carnot engine

By C. Bender, Dorje C. Brody, B. Meister. 2000

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A cyclic thermodynamic heat engine runs most efficiently if it is reversible. Carnot constructed such a reversible heat engine by combining adiabatic and isothermal processes for a system containing an ideal gas. Here, we present an example of a cyclic engine based on a single quantum mechanical particle confined to a potential well. The efficiency of this engine is shown to equal the Carnot efficiency because quantum dynamics is reversible. The quantum heat engine has a cycle consisting of adiabatic and isothermal quantum processes that are close analogues of the corresponding classical processes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/385c10d50b8fe17e89dabf0be5f901e2973bb29e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum thermodynamics (2015, methodology): “The quantum analogue of the Carnot engine consists of a working fluid, which can be a particle in a box [166], qubits [18,159], multiple-level atoms [157] or harmonic oscillators [155,156].”
Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale (2016, methodology): “ons are inﬁnitely slow, otherwise there is a nonzero probability amplitude that at the end of the cycle the particle ends up in a state dierent from the (initial) ground state. In the original paper [334], a more general argument with n rather than just two eigenstates is provided. Entropy and tempe”
Thermodynamics of quantum systems under dynamical control (2015, background): “…proposed and studied (Abah et al., 2012; Alicki, 1979; Alicki et al., 2004; Allahverdyan et al., 2008; Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen, 2005; Bender et al., 2000, 2002; Blickle and Bechinger, 2011; Van den Broeck, 2005; Campisi et al., 2011, 2009; Esposito et al., 2009; Feldmann et al.,…”