Related papers: From virtual work principle to least action princi…

The minimum entropy production principle provides an approximative variational characterization of close-to-equilibrium stationary states, both for macroscopic systems and for stochastic models. Analyzing the fluctuations of the empirical…

Fluid dynamics accompanies with the entropy production thus increases the local temperature, which plays an important role in charged systems such as the ion channel in biological environment and electrodiffusion in capacitors/batteries. In…

The minimum work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for the adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is…

We consider damped stochastic systems in a controlled (time-varying) quadratic potential and study their transition between specified Gibbs-equilibria states in finite time. By the second law of thermodynamics, the minimum amount of work…

Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…

From a new rigorous formulation of the general axiomatic foundations of thermodynamics we derive an operational definition of entropy that responds to the emergent need in many technological frameworks to understand and deploy thermodynamic…

In mechanics, common energy principles are based on fixed boundary conditions. However, in bridge engineering structures, it is usually necessary to adjust the boundary conditions to make the structure's internal force reasonable and save…

We derive an equality for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in finite-dimensional quantum systems. The equality concerns the worst-case work output of a time-dependent Hamiltonian protocol in the presence of a Markovian heat bath. It…

The action principle is introduced to describe the thermodynamic processes of the state functions from the initial equilibrium state to the final equilibrium state. To capture the path-independent property of the state functions through the…

A variational principle is further developed for out of equilibrium dynamical systems by using the concept of maximum entropy. With this new formulation it is obtained a set of two first-order differential equations, revealing the same…

In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…

Optimality principles in nonequilibrium transport networks are linked to a thermodynamic formalism based on generalized transport potentials endowed with Legendre duality and related contact structure. This allows quantifying the distance…

Stochastic thermodynamics allows us to define heat and work for microscopic systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, based on observations of their stochastic dynamics. However, a complete account of the energetics necessitates that all…

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…

Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…

For a two-level quantum mechanical system, we derive microscopically the exact expression for the fluctuation of microscopic work in a multi-step non-equilibrium process, and we rigorously prove that in an isothermal process, the…

In this paper we study the problem of the existence of a least-action principle for invertible, second-order dynamical systems, discrete in time and space. We show that, when the configuration space is finite, a least-action principle does…

In the global framework of finding an axiomatic derivation of nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics from fundamental principles, such as the maximum path entropy -- also known as Maximum Caliber principle -- , this work proposes an…

We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open…

The maximum entropy principle from statistical mechanics states that a closed system attains an equilibrium distribution that maximizes its entropy. We first show that for graphs with fixed number of edges one can define a stochastic edge…