Fredagsforedrag

Sted: Aud. D1

Tid: Fredag d.6 marts 15.15-16.00 (kaffe, te og kage fra 15.05)

Alberto Imparato

Nonequilibrium thermodynamics in small systems

The second law of thermodynamics prescribes that harvesting of thermal energy from a heath bath and its conversion into mechanical work is never a free lunch. The recent possibility of observing, engineering and manipulating small micro- and nano- systems which intrinsically operate in out-of-equilibrium conditions, has shed new light on our understanding of the second law, its range of validity and its probabilistic interpretation. 

I will review the physical properties and the open problems in a few "classical" systems in out-of-equilibrium physics: heat and particle transport in systems in contact with multiple baths, molecular motors that use chemical energy to produce mechanical work, a Maxwell daemon that uses information to generate mechanical work.