Brownian yet Non-Gaussian Heat Engine

TL;DR

This paper studies a Brownian heat engine operating in a heterogeneous thermal environment with fluctuating mobility, analyzing its efficiency and work output through numerical simulations and comparing it to homogeneous bath scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a model of a Brownian heat engine in a non-Gaussian, heterogeneous bath and evaluates how non-Gaussianity affects engine performance.

Findings

Gaussian heat engine performance bounds the non-Gaussian case

Non-Gaussian distributions reduce the engine's efficiency

Performance metrics are numerically evaluated for different bath conditions

Abstract

We investigate the performance of a Brownian heat engine working in a heterogeneous thermal bath where the mobility fluctuates. Brownian particle is trapped by the time-dependent harmonic potential, by changing the stiffness coefficient and the bath temperatures, we perform a Stirling cycle. We numerically evaluated the average work, power and efficiency. We compare our results with the Brownian heat engine working in a homogeneous thermal bath. We find that for the normal diffusive system, the performance of a Gaussian heat engine serves as an upper bound. We also observe that the non-Gaussian position distribution decreases the stochastic heat engine performance.