The effects of asymmetry in active noises on the efficiency of single colloidal Stirling engines with active noises

Abstract

Molecular machines, which operate in highly fluctuating environments far from equilibrium, may benefit from their non-equilibrium environments. It is, however, a topic of controversy how the efficiency of the microscopic engines can be enhanced. Recent experiments showed that microscopic Stirling engines in bacterial reservoirs could show high performance beyond the equilibrium thermodynamics. In this work, we perform overdamped Langevin dynamics simulations for microscopic Stirling heat engines in bacterial reservoirs and show that the temperature dependence of the magnitude of active noises should be responsible for such high efficiency. Only when we introduce temperature-dependent active noises, the efficiency of the microscopic Stirling engines is enhanced significantly as in experiments.