A solar cell is a heat engine, but textbook treatments are not wholly satisfactory from a thermodynamic standpoint, since they present solar cells as directly converting the energy of light into electricity, and the current ...

In the early 18th century, J. E. E. Bessler, known as Orffyreus, constructed several wheels that he claimed could keep turning forever, powered only by gravity. He never revealed the details of his invention, but he ...

When a real fluid is expelled quickly from a tube, it forms a jet separated from the surrounding fluid by a thin, turbulent layer. On the other hand, when the same fluid is sucked into the tube, it comes in from all ...

The linear coupling of a rotating heat bath to a quantum field is studied in the framework of the Markovian master equation for the field's non-unitary time evolution. The bath's rotation induces population inversion for ...

We propose a microphysical theory of the triboelectric effect by which mechanical rubbing separates charges across the interface between two materials. Surface electrons are treated as an open system coupled to two baths, ...

We introduce the “leaking elastic capacitor” (LEC) model, a nonconservative dynamical system that combines simple electrical and mechanical degrees of freedom. We show that an LEC connected to an external voltage source ...

We propose a dynamical theory of how the chemical energy stored in a battery generates the electromotive force (emf). In this picture, the battery's half-cell acts as an engine, cyclically extracting work from its underlying ...

Engines are open systems that can generate work cyclically at the expense of an external disequilibrium. They are ubiquitous in nature and technology, but the course of mathematical physics over the last 300 years has ...