The Resetting Heat Engine: A Thermodynamic Cycle of Thermal Expansion and Compression (opens in new tab)

We consider a Brownian particle confined by an external potential and subject to stochastic resetting to the origin. Motivated by the repetitive nature of the dynamics, we describe the process as a thermodynamic cycle of thermal expansion and collapse, analyzed via a framework based on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between forward and reversed trajectory ensembles. While the entropy production generally depends on the full trajectory ense...