Terças Hugo, Ribeiro Sofia, Pezzutto Marco, Omar Yasser
Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal.
Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Lisbon, Portugal.
Phys Rev E. 2017 Feb;95(2-1):022135. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.022135. Epub 2017 Feb 24.
We propose a quantum thermal machine composed of two nanomechanical resonators (two membranes suspended over a trench in a substrate) placed a few μm from each other. The quantum thermodynamical cycle is powered by the Casimir interaction between the resonators and the working fluid is the polariton resulting from the mixture of the flexural (out-of-plane) vibrations. With the help of piezoelectric cells, we select and sweep the polariton frequency cyclically. We calculate the performance of the proposed quantum thermal machines and show that high efficiencies are achieved thanks to (i) the strong coupling between the resonators and (ii) the large difference between the membrane stiffnesses. Our findings can be of particular importance for applications in nanomechanical technologies where a sensitive control of temperature is needed.
我们提出了一种量子热机，它由两个纳米机械谐振器（两片悬浮在衬底沟槽上方的薄膜）组成，彼此相距几微米。量子热力学循环由谐振器之间的卡西米尔相互作用驱动，工作流体是由弯曲（面外）振动混合产生的极化激元。借助压电元件，我们周期性地选择和扫描极化激元频率。我们计算了所提出的量子热机的性能，并表明由于（i）谐振器之间的强耦合和（ii）薄膜刚度之间的巨大差异，实现了高效率。我们的发现对于需要精确控制温度的纳米机械技术应用可能特别重要。
