Abstract
Thermal machines perform useful tasks--such as producing work, cooling, or heating--by exchanging energy, and possibly additional conserved quantities such as particles, with reservoirs. Here we consider thermal machines that perform more than one useful task simultaneously, terming these "hybrid thermal machines". We outline their restrictions imposed by the laws of thermodynamics and we quantify their performance in terms of efficiencies. To illustrate their full potential, reservoirs that feature multiple conserved quantities, described by generalized Gibbs ensembles, are considered. A minimal model for a hybrid thermal machine is introduced, featuring three reservoirs and two conserved quantities, e.g., energy and particle number. This model can be readily implemented in a thermoelectric setup based on quantum dots, and hybrid regimes are accessible considering realistic parameters.
Highlights
A considerable body of work has been devoted to the study of thermal machines at the nanoscale in recent years
Our results provide a systematic method for quantifying the performance of such hybrid thermal machines, enabling future studies of these devices
In particular we presented a minimal model featuring three reservoirs and two conserved quantities, energy and particle number
Summary
A considerable body of work has been devoted to the study of thermal machines at the nanoscale in recent years. We discuss the implications of our results with the help of a minimal model for a hybrid thermal machine powered by generalized Gibbs ensembles. To this end, we consider a three-terminal device where both energy and one additional conserved quantity (e.g., particles) may be exchanged. We illustrate the practical relevance of hybrid thermal machines by analyzing an implementation of our minimal model based on two capacitively coupled quantum dots [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37] in the parameter regime corresponding to recent experiments [36].
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