Speaker
Janet Anders
(University of Exeter & University of Potsdam)
Description
Thermodynamics at the micro-scale exhibits distinctive features due to the fluctuating exchange of energy between small objects and their environment. This regime of stochastic thermodynamics explains many cellular and biological processes, and a full understanding is required in the development of nanotechnologies. We present an experiment underdamped single-particle heat engine, where weak coupling to the thermal environment enables us to define synthetic heat baths with temperatures in excess of 10^5 K. Such an engine has an efficiency of over 10%, and exhibits many unique features of this thermodynamic regime, including giant efficiency fluctuations and breaking of the equipartition theorem
