Efficiency fluctuations of small machines with unknown losses

Abstract

The efficiency statistics of a small thermodynamic machine has been recently investigated assuming that the total dissipation is a linear combination of two currents: the input and output currents. Here, we relax this standard assumption and consider the question of the efficiency fluctuations for a machine involving three different currents, first in full generality and second for two different examples. Since the third current may not be measurable and/or may decrease the machine efficiency, our motivation is to study the effect of unknown losses in small machines.