Related papers: Critique of some thermodynamic proofs based on the…
According to classical Boltzmannian thermodynamics, the efficiency of a cyclic machine is strictly lower than one. Such a result is a straightforward consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics. Recent advances in the study of the…
It is shown that the Gibbs paradox is actually paralogism, viz. an erroneous statement sounding credible due to the statistic-mechanical interpretation of entropy as a measure of "any and all" irreversibility. As an alternative, the…
By using very general arguments, we show that the entropy loss conjecture at the glass transition violates the second law of thermodynamics and must be rejected.
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
The thermodynamic uncertainty relation expresses a universal trade-off between precision and entropy production, which applies in its original formulation to current observables in steady-state systems. We generalize this relation to…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
A quantum-mechanical analog of the Carnot engine reversibly working at vanishing temperature, shortly termed the quantum-mechanical Carnot engine, is discussed. A general formula for the efficiency of such an engine with an arbitrary…
The second law of thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous heat from a cold to a hot body. However, it has been theoretically and experimentally shown that energy can flow from a cold to a hot body if the bodies are initially correlated. We…
Several models of quantum open systems are known at present to violate, according to principles of the standard quantum theory of open systems, the second law of thermodynamics. Here, a new and rather trivial model of another type is…
According to the second law, the efficiency of cyclic heat engines is limited by the Carnot bound that is attained by engines that operate between two thermal baths under the reversibility condition whereby the total entropy does not…
Dunkel and Hilbert, "Consistent thermostatistics forbids negative absolute temperatures," Nature Physics, {\bf 10}, 67 (2014), and Hilbert, H\"anggi, and Dunkel, "Thermodynamic laws in isolated systems," Phys. Rev. E {\bf 90}, 062116 (2014)…
The relationships between reversible Carnot cycles, the absence of perpetual motion machines and the existence of a non-decreasing, globally unique entropy function forms the starting point of many textbook presentations of the foundations…
Quantum systems strongly coupled to many-body systems equilibrate to the reduced state of a global thermal state, deviating from the local thermal state of the system as it occurs in the weak-coupling limit. Taking this insight as a…
Thermodynamic systems involving reversible and non-reversible heat transfer are used to derive integral inequalities expected from the Second of Law of Thermodynamics. Then, the inequalities are proved and generalized to higher dimensions…
While strong system-bath coupling produces rich and interesting phenomena, applications to quantum thermal engines have been so far pointing mainly at detrimental effects. The delicate trade-off between efficiency loss due to strong…
A heat engine operating on the basis of the Carnot cycle is considered, where the mechanical work performed is dissipated within the engine at the temperature of the warmer isotherm and the resulting heat is added to the engine together…
The Carnot theorem, one expression of the second law of thermodynamics, places a fundamental upper bound on the efficiency of heat engines operating between two heat baths. The Carnot theorem can be stated in a more generalized form for…
The thermodynamics of quantum systems coupled to periodically modulated heat baths and work reservoirs is developed. By identifying affinities and fluxes, the first and second law are formulated consistently. In the linear response regime,…
The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…
This article presents a heuristic combination of the local and global formulations of the second law of thermodynamics that suggests the possibility of theoretical existence of thermodynamics processes with positive and negative entropy…