English

On the Second Law of thermodynamics and the piston problem

Statistical Mechanics 2016-08-31 v1

Abstract

The piston problem is investigated in the case where the length of the cylinder is infinite (on both sides) and the ratio m/Mm/M is a very small parameter, where mm is the mass of one particle of the gaz and MM is the mass of the piston. Introducing initial conditions such that the stochastic motion of the piston remains in the average at the origin (no drift), it is shown that the time evolution of the fluids, analytically derived from Liouville equation, agrees with the Second Law of thermodynamics. We thus have a non equilibrium microscopical model whose evolution can be explicitly shown to obey the two laws of thermodynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0312340,
  title  = {On the Second Law of thermodynamics and the piston problem},
  author = {C. Gruber and S. Pache and A. Lesne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0312340},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

29 pages, 9 figures submitted to Journal of Statistical Physics (2003)