Advisor: David Gelbwaser
Contact: dgelbi@technion.ac.il
Project description:
Electromagnetic non-reciprocity has been recently shown to be a key condition for creating Casimir forces heat engines that do not have contact among their parts, reducing friction and wearing. Non-reciprocity produces violations of detailed balance, which is the basic thermodynamic resource that allows the transformation of high entropic energy, such as heat, into a low entropy and “useful” energy, such as ATP or electrical power. This is the basic process behind any system that transforms energy, such as solar cells, plants and molecular engines. The extent to which non-reciprocity could improve the performance of these systems is still unknown. This project aims to discover this and, in this way, improve the performance of all these devices
Prerequisites: Basic course on Quantum mechanics, basic programming skills in any language (python, Mathematica, Matlab, etc)
References:
Alicki, Robert, Milan Šindelka, and David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky. “Violation of detailed balance in quantum open systems.” Physical Review Letters 131.4 (2023): 040401.
Gelbwaser-Klimovsky, David, Robert Alicki, and Gershon Kurizki. “Minimal universal quantum heat machine.” Physical Review E—Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics 87.1 (2013): 012140.
Unveiling the limitations of energy conversion in quantum systems