Platinum Jubilee Lecture
New Paradigms in Nano Heat Engines
Speaker: Prof. Ajay Sood (Department of Physics, IISc, Bangalore & Principal Scientific Adviser, Govt. of India, New Delhi)
Single-particle heat engines, where the working substance is typically an atom or a micro-meter sized colloid, operate in a regime swamped by fluctuations. The experimental realization of these engines in the past decade has helped advance our understanding of heat-to-work conversion at mesoscopic length scales and offered a glimpse into the functioning of molecular motors and machines. Stochastic heat engines present us with an opportunity that is practically impossible to realize in their macroscopic counterparts. With single-particle engines, especially those made of a colloid, it is now possible to engineer non-trivial couplings between the working substance and the bath in many ways. In this talk, I will discuss how such couplings can be brought about and how they feed into the operation of colloidal heat engines. This will include our work related to engines driven by active, non-equilibrium [1,2] and viscoelastic reservoirs [3] coupled engines working cooperatively to extract more work [4] and the breakdown of the well-known powerefficiency trade-off [5]
1. Sudeesh Krishnamurthy, Subho Ghosh, Dipankar Chatterji, Rajesh Ganapathy, A.K. Sood A Micrometer-sized Heat Engine Operating Between Bacterial Reservoirs. Nature Physics 12, 1134 (2016).
2. Niloyendu Roy, Nathan Leroux, A.K. Sood and Rajesh Ganapathy, Tuning the performance of a micrometer-sized Stirling engine through reservoir engineering. Nature Communications 12, 4927 (2021)
3. N. Roy, A.K. Sood and Rajesh Ganapathy, Harnessing viscoelasticity to suppress irreversibility build up in a colloidal sterling engine (2023).
4. Sudeesh Krishnamurthy, Rajesh Ganapathy and A.K. Sood, Synergistic action in colloidal heat engines coupled by nonconservative flows. Soft Matter 18, 7621 (2022).
5. Sudeesh Krishnamurthy, Rajesh Ganapathy and A.K. Sood, Overcoming power-efficiency tradeoff in a micro heat engine by engineered system-bath interactions. Nat.Comm(2023).
Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood is the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India (PSA to GoI) from April 2022. He is also the Chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology & Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC). Prof. Sood is also a National Science Chair at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. He was a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) from 2018 to March 2022 and from 2009 to 2014, he had also served as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Prime Minister of India.
Prof. Sood has a Doctorate in Physics from IISc Bangalore. His research interests include the Physics of Quantum materials as well as Soft and Active matter. He has published more than 470 papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds several patents.
His work has been recognised by many awards, including the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India. He was President of the Indian National Science Academy (2017-19), President of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2010-12), and Secretary-General, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Trieste, Italy (2013-2018). He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, UK (FRS) in 2015.
He has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the G. D. Birla Award for Scientific Research, the TWAS Prize in Physics, the Millennium Gold Medal of the Indian Science Congress Association, the Sir C. V. Raman Award of the UGC, the Homi Bhabha Medal of the Indian National Science Academy, G. M. Modi Award for Science and Technology, 25th SIES Sri. Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi National Eminence Award in the category of Science & Technology and Asutosh Mookerjee Memorial Life Time Award by Indian Science Congress, among others. He has been conferred Doctor of Philosophy (Honoris Causa) by many universities. He serves as Associate Editor in a reputed International journal ‘ACS Nano’.