Related papers: Shannon Meets Carnot: Generalized Second Thermodyn…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
Equilibrium statistics of Hamiltonian systems is correctly described by the microcanonical ensemble. Classically this is the manifold of all points in the $N-$body phase space with the given total energy. Due to Boltzmann's principle,…
The Heat theorem reveals the second law of equilibrium Thermodynamics (i.e.existence of Entropy) as a manifestation of a general property of Hamiltonian Mechanics and of the Ergodic Hypothesis, valid for 1 as well as $10^{23}$ degrees of…
I argue here that both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about certain types of information without the need to invoke…
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
Thermodynamics is accepted as a universal truth, encompassing all macroscopic objects. Therefore, it is surprising to find that, within our current understanding, the photovoltaic effect has so far eluded the first and second laws of…
We extend the recently developed non-gaussian thermodynamic formalism \cite{tre98} of a (presumably strongly turbulent) non-Markovian medium to its most general form that allows for the formulation of a consistent thermodynamic theory. All…
We obtain generalizations of the Kelvin-Planck, Clausius, and Carnot statements of the second law of thermodynamics, for situations involving information processing. To this end, we consider an information reservoir (representing, e.g. a…
We derive a generalization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that uses Bayesian updates to explicitly incorporate the effects of a measurement of a system at some point in its evolution. By allowing an experimenter's knowledge to be…
Microcanonical Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics on one hand to closed finite and even small systems and on the other to the largest,self-gravitating ones. However, one has to reconsider the fundamental…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
The concept of temperature is one of the key ideas in describing the thermodynamical properties of a physical system. In classical statistical mechanics of ideal gases, the notion of temperature can be described in two different ways, the…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
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…
The development of stochastic thermodynamics during the last decades prompted the discovery of novel nonequilibrium relations refining our understanding of the second law in small fluctuating systems and its connection with information…
We draw relationships between the generalized data processing theorems of Zakai and Ziv (1973 and 1975) and the dynamical version of the second law of thermodynamics, a.k.a. the Boltzmann H-Theorem, which asserts that the Shannon entropy,…
We show how statistical thermodynamics can be formulated in situations in which thermodynamics applies, while equilibrium statistical mechanics does not. A typical case is, in the words of Landau and Lifshitz, that of partial (or…
Materials that are constantly driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium, such as active and living systems, typically violate the Einstein relation. This may arise from active contributions to particle fluctuations which are unrelated to the…
In traditional thermodynamical and statistical-mechanical approaches one has (some) detailed knowledge of the principles governing the microdynamics of a system. However in many instances we may not have a Hamiltonian or good information…