Heat Engine Driven by Photon Tunneling in Many-Body Systems

Ivan Latella (1, 2) , Agustín Pérez-Madrid (1) , J Miguel Rubi (1) , Svend-Age Biehs (3) , Philippe Ben-Abdallah (2)

1 Departament de Física Fonamental [Barcelona]
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Naphel
3 Institut für Physik [Oldenburg]

Near-field heat engines are devices that convert the evanescent thermal field supported by a primary source into usable mechanical energy. By analyzing the thermodynamic performance of three-body near-field heat engines, we demonstrate that the power they supply can be substantially larger than that of two-body systems, showing their strong potential for energy harvesting. Theoretical limits for energy and entropy fluxes in three-body systems are discussed and compared with their corresponding two-body counterparts. Such considerations confirm that the thermodynamic availability in energy-conversion processes driven by three-body photon tunneling can exceed the thermodynamic availability in two-body systems.

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Ivan Latella, Agustín Pérez-Madrid, J Miguel Rubi, Svend-Age Biehs, Philippe Ben-Abdallah. Heat Engine Driven by Photon Tunneling in Many-Body Systems. Physical Review Applied, 2015, 4 (1), pp.011001. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevApplied.4.011001⟩. ⟨hal-01335155⟩