By considering an ensemble of Brownian particles suspended in a heat bath as a thermodynamic system with an internal degree of freedom it is possible to obtain the Fokker-Planck equation for Brownian motion in a temperature gradient, by applying the scheme of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We recover explicitely the equations derived in particular by Zubarev and Bashkirov using statistical mec...

When a chiral liquid crystal is given a transport current, a unidirectional molecular motion is known to take place, which is called the Lehmann effect. In this paper, we study the mysterious heat-current-driven Lehmann effect using two types of hemispherical cholesteric droplets using polarizing, reflecting, confocal and fluorescent microscopies. Both the droplets, coexisting with the isotropi...

In this Letter, we consider a liquid mixture confined between two thermally conducting walls subjected to a stationary temperature gradient. While in a one-component liquid nonequilibrium fluctuation forces appear inside the liquid layer, nonequilibrium fluctuations in a mixture induce a Casimir-like force on the walls. The physical reason is that the temperature gradient induces large concentr...

This work shows that vesicles derived from the blue marlin heater organ retain a sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca(2+)-ATPase that can interconvert different forms of energy. During the hydrolysis of ATP part of the energy is always converted into heat, and the other part can be converted into work (Ca(2+) transport) or heat, depending on the temperature and the presence of KCl in the reaction med...

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. Thermography, also known as thermal or infrared imaging, is a procedure to determine if an abnormality is present in the breast tissue temperature distribution. This abnormality in temperature distribution might indicate the presence of an embedded tumor. Although thermography is currently used to indicate the presence of an abnormality, ther...

Onsager symmetry implies that a Brownian motor, driven by a temperature gradient, will also perform a refrigerator function upon loading. We analytically calculate the corresponding heat flow for an exactly solvable microscopic model and compare it with molecular dynamics simulations.

The temperature of a combustible material will rise or even blow up when a heat source moves across it. In this paper, we study the blow-up phenomenon in this kind of moving heat source problems in two-dimensions. First, a two-dimensional heat equation with a nonlinear source term is introduced to model the problem. The nonlinear source is localized around a circle which is allowed to move. By ...

Introduction: Knowledge of the Moon's thermal structure is fundamental in understanding its origin and internal compositional variation, both of which are intertwined with the origin of the Earth and the rest of the solar system (NASA Strategic Goal 3C). The flow of heat that originates from the lunar interior can be measured, and serves as a constraint to the thermal structure. That is why hea...