2010/06/15 by Karen Hovhannisyan, Armen E. Allahverdyan, Armen E Allahverdyan
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Diffusion #Dissipation #Flow (mathematics) #Heat transfer #Irreversible process #Non-equilibrium thermodynamics #Process (computing) #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Thermal management of electronic devices and systems #Thermal properties of materials #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2010/06/p06010
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2010) P06010 · 11 pages, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2010/06/15 · arxiv created 2010/07/20 · arxiv updated 2010/07/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (the human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across biomembranes, industrial heat-exchangers and so on). The thermodynamics of such processes remains, however, open. Here we study enhanced heat transfer by using a model junction immersed between two thermal baths at different temperatures T h and T c ( T h > T c ). The transferred heat power is enhanced via controlling the junction by means of external time-dependent fields. Provided that the spontaneous heat flow process is optimized over the junction Hamiltonian, any enhancement of this spontaneous process demands consumption and subsequent dissipation of work. The efficiency of the enhancement is defined via the increment in the heat power divided by the amount of work done. We show that this efficiency is bounded from above by T c /( T h − T c ). Formally this is identical to the Carnot bound for the efficiency of ordinary refrigerators which transfer heat from cold to hot bodies. It also shares some (but not all) physical features of the Carnot bound.