Seminar:Thermodynamic Geometry in Small Heat Engines

Guest: Sema Seymen, Zhejiang University

Title: Thermodynamic Geometry in Small Heat Engines (PHYS, ME)

Date/Time: November 20, 2024, 13:40

Location: FENS G032

Abstract: In real-life thermodynamic systems, energy loss is inevitable since they do not operate adiabatically. Therefore, minimizing energy loss is a crucial goal to improve the efficiency of a heat engine. In small scale heat engines, the amount of work done by the machine or the heat it absorbs from the heat source is also small due to the limited number of degrees of freedom. For this reason, fluctuations in thermodynamic quantities become significant at this small scale. The concept of thermodynamic geometry has emerged as a valuable tool for working on the optimization of a small heat engine. The thermodynamic geometry approach provides a suitable framework for exploring the relationships between quantities directly related to efficiency, such as energy loss and work. In micro-scale heat engines, fluctuations in energy loss are also expressed within the framework of thermodynamic geometry [1]. To our knowledge, minimizing both energy loss and its fluctuations simultaneously remains an unsolved problem. In this talk, I will first briefly discuss the thermodynamic geometry formulation. I will show its connection to efficiency optimization for an example of a small heat engine and discuss whether we can simultaneously optimize energy loss and its fluctuations using this formalism.

[1] G. Watanabe and Y. Minami, Finite-time thermodynamics of fluctuations in

microscopic heat engines, Phys. Rev. Res. 4, L012008 (2022).

Bio: Sema Seymen is a postdoctoral researcher at Zhejiang University in China, working with Professor Gentaro Watanabe on Riemannian geometric formalism of fluctuations in small heat engines. She received her B.Sc. in Physics Engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 2011, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from Bogazici University in 2015 and 2022, respectively. During her graduate studies with Professor Teoman Turgut on quantum scattering from singular potentials, she participated in two research projects of Professor Ali Mostafazadeh from Koc University on this subject. Currently, she focuses on optimizing microscopic heat engines using thermodynamic geometry, with the potential to extend her work to quantum thermodynamical systems.