Tuning the performance of a micrometer-sized Stirling engine through reservoir engineering

Roy, N and Leroux, N and Sood, AK and Ganapathy, R (2021) Tuning the performance of a micrometer-sized Stirling engine through reservoir engineering. In: Nature Communications, 12 (1).

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Abstract

Colloidal heat engines are paradigmatic models to understand the conversion of heat into work in a noisy environment - a domain where biological and synthetic nano/micro machines function. While the operation of these engines across thermal baths is well-understood, how they function across baths with noise statistics that is non-Gaussian and also lacks memory, the simplest departure from the thermal case, remains unclear. Here we quantified the performance of a colloidal Stirling engine operating between an engineered memoryless non-Gaussian bath and a Gaussian one. In the quasistatic limit, the non-Gaussian engine functioned like a thermal one as predicted by theory. On increasing the operating speed, due to the nature of noise statistics, the onset of irreversibility for the non-Gaussian engine preceded its thermal counterpart and thus shifted the operating speed at which power is maximum. The performance of nano/micro machines can be tuned by altering only the nature of reservoir noise statistics. © 2021, The Author(s).

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Nature Communications
Publisher:	Nature Research
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Authors
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	22 Sep 2021 10:12
Last Modified:	22 Sep 2021 10:12
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/69721

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