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Uncovering the origin of the arrow of time remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the second law of thermodynamics, which declares that entropy…
We investigate the thermodynamic arrow of time in a time-symmetrically recollapsing universe by calculating quantum mechanically the entropy production of a massive scalar field. It is found that even though the Hamiltonian has a…
Understanding the emergence of the thermodynamic arrow of time in microscopic systems is of fundamental importance, particularly given that unitary evolution preserves time-reversal symmetry. While projective measurements introduce temporal…
Recently a number of approaches has been developed to connect the microscopic dynamics of particle systems to the macroscopic properties of systems in nonequilibrium stationary states, via the theory of dynamical systems. This way a direct…
A number of writers have been attracted to the idea that some of the peculiarities of quantum theory might be manifestations of 'backward' or 'retro' causality, underlying the quantum description. This idea has been explored in the…
Time-reversal had always been assumed to be a symmetry of physics at the fundamental level. In this paper we will explore the violations of time-reversal symmetry at the fundamental level and the consequences on thermodynamic systems.…
Thermodynamics has a clear arrow of time, characterized by the irreversible approach to equilibrium. This stands in contrast to the laws of microscopic theories, which are invariant under time-reversal. Foundational discussions of this…
The entropy production rate (EPR), a key measure of thermodynamic irreversibility in stochastic thermodynamics, is difficult to determine directly in experiments, motivating lower-bound-based estimation from observations. However, a…
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…
Measuring entropy production of a system directly from the experimental data is highly desirable since it gives a quantifiable measure of the time-irreversibility for non-equilibrium systems and can be used as a cost function to optimize…
The characterization of irreversibility in general quantum processes is an open problem of increasing techno- logical relevance. Yet, the tools currently available to this aim are mostly limited to the assessment of dynamics induced by…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the…
Microscopic physical laws are time-symmetric, hence, a priori there exists no preferential temporal direction. However, the second law of thermodynamics allows one to associate the "forward" temporal direction to a positive variation of the…
Through extended consideration of two wide classes of case studies -- dilute gases and linear systems -- I explore the ways in which assumptions of probability and irreversibility occur in contemporary statistical mechanics, where the…
Entropy creation rate is introduced for a system interacting with thermostats ({\it i.e.}, in the usual language, for a system subject to internal conservative forces interacting with ``external'' thermostats via conservative forces) and a…
Clausius inequality has deep implications for reversibility and the arrow of time. Quantum theory is able to extend this result for closed systems by inspecting the trajectory of the density matrix on its manifold. Here we show that this…
By making use of a recently proposed framework for the inference of thermodynamic irreversibility in bosonic quantum systems, we experimentally measure and characterize the entropy production rates in the non-equilibrium steady state of two…
We investigate a number of simple toy models to explore interesting relationships between dynamics and typicality. We start with an infinite model that has been proposed as an illustration of how non-ergodic dynamics can produce interesting…
Current research in statistical mechanics mostly concerns the investigation of out-of-equilibrium, irreversible processes, which are ubiquitous in nature and still far from being theoretically understood. Even the precise characterization…