Physics Seminar - Rahul Suresh Marathe

Active particles are self-propelled entities that consume energy and move in a directed fashion. Brownian heat engines containing Active particles have become extremely popular in recent times. These engines are single-particle stochastic heat engines. They usually contain a passive Brownian particle in an active particle bath e.g. bacterial suspension. The passive particle is trapped in a harmonic potential and then the trap strength is varied according to a certain well-known engine protocol e.g. Carnot or Stirling cycle. The performance of such engines is dominated by fluctuations due to their microscopic size. Under certain conditions, Active engines seem to outperform their passive counterparts. These systems can be studied using a powerful tool called Stochastic Thermodynamics, developed in the last couple of decades. I will discuss some recent analytical as well as numerical works done by our group in this area.