A K Sood
IISc, Bengaluru
Ajay Kumar Sood has been the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India (PSA to GoI) since April 2022 and also the Chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology & Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC). He is also a National Science Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. 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 also served as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Prime Minister of India. He has a Doctorate in Physics from IISc, Bengaluru. His research interests include the physics of quantum materials and soft and active matter. He has published over 450 papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds several patents. He was elected Fellow of IASc in 1991.
Session 1C: Special Lecture
Chairperson: Umesh V Waghmare, JNCASR, Bengaluru
Overcoming an Age-Old Thermodynamic Puzzle in Micro-Heat Engines
A heat engine, a device to convert thermal energy to mechanical energy, has been a triumph of our understanding of classical thermodynamics over the last three centuries. In recent years, taking the heat engine concept to a mesoscopic scale, necessarily dominated by fluctuations, has led to the development of stochastic thermodynamics. 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 has 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.Observations on engines driven by equilibrium reservoirs for the last decades have led to an understanding that such engines trade off efficiency to operate at finite power – a hypothesis vital to optimising the performance of all man-made machinery. I will discuss our recent work [1] that has cracked this age-old thermodynamic puzzle. We have experimentally established that by engineering the non-trivial coupling between the working substance and the bath, micro-heat engines can achieve both high efficiency and high power simultaneously. 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 and non-equilibrium reservoirs with extremely high-performance coupled engines working cooperatively to extract more work and the visco-elastic reservoirs [2,3,4]