Nano Heat Engines: Extracting Work from Bacteria

* Join us for tea and coffee outside Lecture Theatre A prior to this talk.*

The UK’s Institute of Physics and the Indian Physics Association Bilateral Exchange Programme sponsors an annual lecture series alternately in the two countries named after the father of India’s nuclear energy programme, Homi Bhabha. This year’s Homi Bhabha lecturer, Prof Ajay Sood, FRS, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, is an experimentalist whose interest ranges from hard condensed matter through colloids to active matter. 

Abstract: Artificial microscale heat engines are prototypical models to explore the mechanisms of energy transduction in a fluctuation dominated regime. Starting from Feynman’s rachet wheel and biological motors, this talk will present recent ongoing experiments to realize a nano-sized active Sterling heat engine operating between two non-equilibrium reservoirs with different activities of the bacteria. At high activities of bacteria, the efficiency of heat engines surpasses the equilibrium saturation limit of Sterling efficiency. The presentation will include the challenges in translating this fascinating demonstration of extracting work from bacterial activity into practical applications and in building cascade of heat engines that perform in unison.