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Thermal noise engines

Electrical heat engines driven by the Johnson-Nyquist noise of resistors are introduced. They utilize Coulomb's law and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of statistical physics that is the reverse phenomenon of heat dissipation in a resistor. No steams, gases, liquids, photons, combustion, phase transition, or exhaust/pollution are present here. In these engines, instead of heat reservoirs, cylinders, pistons and valves, resistors, capacitors and switches are the building elements. For the best performance, a large number of parallel engines must be integrated to run in a synchronized fashion and the characteristic size of the elementary engine must be at the 10 nanometers scale. At room temperature, in the most idealistic case, a two-dimensional ensemble of engines of 25 nanometer characteristic size integrated on a 2.5x2.5 cm silicon wafer with 12 Celsius temperature difference between the warm-source and the cold-sink would produce a specific power of about 0.4 Watt. Regular and coherent (correlated-cylinder states) versions are shown and both of them can work in either four-stroke or two-stroke modes. The coherent engines have properties that correspond to coherent quantu