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Updated: Sep 11, 2025

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relations for Coherent Transport
Kay Brandner1,2, Keiji Saito3
1University of Nottingham, School of Physics and Astronomy, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
We derive a universal thermodynamic uncertainty relation for fermionic coherent transport, which bounds the total rate of entropy production in terms of the mean and fluctuations of a single particle current. This bound holds for any multiterminal geometry and arbitrary chemical and thermal biases, as long as no external magnetic fields are applied. It can further be saturated in two-terminal settings with boxcar-shaped transmission functions and reduces to its classical counterpart in linear response. Upon insertion of a numerical factor, our bound also extends to systems with broken time-reversal symmetry. As an application, we derive trade-off relations between the figures of merit of coherent thermoelectric heat engines and refrigerators, which show that such devices can attain ideal efficiency only at vanishing mean power or diverging power fluctuations. To illustrate our results, we work out a model of a coherent conductor consisting of a chain of quantum dots.
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