Multilayer Graphene as an Endoreversible Otto Engine

Graphene is perhaps the most prominent "Dirac material," a class of systems whose electronic structure gives rise to charge carriers that behave as relativistic massless fermions. This emergence of relativistic behavior at laboratory scale energies makes graphene an ideal environment for probing the thermodynamics of relativistic quantum systems. For multilayer graphene structures, subject to an external magnetic field, the energy spectrum strongly depends on the number of layers, and we examine the performance of a finite-time endoreversible Otto cycle with multilayer graphene systems as working mediums. We show that there exists a simple relationship between the engine efficiency and the number of layers, and that the efficiency at maximum power can exceed that of a classical working medium.