Autonomous Rotor Heat Engine

Understand

The triumph of heat engines is their ability to convert the disordered energy of thermal sources into useful mechanical motion.

• In recent years, much effort has been devoted to generalizing thermodynamic notions to the quantum regime, partly motivated by the promise of surpassing classical heat engines.
• Here, we instead adopt a bottom-up approach: we propose a realistic autonomous heat engine that can serve as a testbed for quantum effects in the context of thermodynamics.
• Our model draws inspiration from actual piston engines and is built from closed-system Hamiltonians and weak bath coupling terms.