Sudeesh Krishnamurthy

arXiv2021

Synergistic action in colloidal heat engines coupled by non-conservative flows

Collective operation of multiple engines to achieve a common objective is a vital step in the design of complex machines. Recent studies have reduced the length scales of engine design to micro and nanometers. While strategies to build complex machines from these remain to be devised, even the basic design principles remain obscure. Here, we construct and analyze the simplest collection of two engines from a pair of colloidal microspheres in optical traps at close separation. We demonstrate that at such proximity, non-conservative scattering forces that were hitherto neglected, affect the particle motion and hydrodynamics arising from dissipating these results in violating zeroth law of thermodynamics. Leveraging this in a manner analogous to microswimmers and active Brownian particles, we show that a collection of two interacting engines outperform those that are well separated. While these results explore the simplest case of two engines, the underlying concepts could aid in designing larger collections akin to biological systems.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

A Micrometer-sized Heat Engine Operating Between Bacterial Reservoirs

Artificial micro heat engines are prototypical models to explore and elucidate the mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1-2]. Micro heat engines realized hitherto mimicked their macroscopic counterparts and operated between reservoirs that were effectively thermal [3-7]. For such reservoirs, temperature is a well-defined state variable and stochastic thermodynamics provides a precise framework for quantifying engine performance [8-9]. It remains unclear whether these concepts readily carry over to situations where the reservoirs are out-of-equilibrium [10], a scenario of particular importance to the functioning of synthetic [11-12] and biological [13] micro engines and motors. Here we experimentally realized a micrometer-sized active Stirling engine by periodically cycling a colloidal particle in a time-varying harmonic optical potential across bacterial baths at different activities. Unlike in equilibrium thermal reservoirs, the displacement statistics of the trapped particle becomes increasingly non-Gaussian with activity. We show that as much as $\approx$ 85\% of the total power output and $\approx$ 50\% of the overall efficiency stems from large non-Gaussian particle displacements alone. Most remarkably, at the highest activities investigated, the efficiency of our quasi-static active heat engines surpasses the equilibrium saturation limit of Stirling efficiency - the maximum efficiency of a Stirling engine with the ratio of cold and hot reservoir temperatures ${T_C\over T_H} \to 0$. Crucially, the failure of effective temperature descriptions [14-16] for active reservoirs highlights the dire need for theories that can better capture the physics of micro motors and heat engines that operate in strongly non-thermal environments.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗