Stochastic heat engine using multiple interacting active particles

Stochastic heat engines using active particles have been shown to exhibit advantages over engines using passive particles. In this work, we use multiple self-propelling particles undergoing Vicsek-like aligning interaction as our working system. The particles are confined in a twodimensional circular trap. The interplay between the confinement and the activity of the particles induces clustering. These clusters change their locations relative to the walls of the trap, when the wall steepness is varied with time. In this work we demonstrate that changing the steepness of the wall and the activity of the particles time-periodically can help in extracting work from the system. In this setup, we study the variations in extracted work with the activity, rotational diffusion, and the Vicsek radius of individual particles. We also comment on the caveats involved in the definition of the efficiency in accordance with the usual prescription of the stochastic thermodynamics of microscopic heat engines.