Correlating Thermal Machines and the Second Law at the Nanoscale
Correlating Thermal Machines and the Second Law at the Nanoscale
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like quantities; strong fluctuations (possibly of quantum origin) allow to extract less work reliably than what is expected …