Related papers: Information Conservation, Entropy Increase and the…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…
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…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
We present a pedagogical review of the fundamental concepts in thermodynamics of information, by focusing on the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy production. Especially, we discuss the relationship among thermodynamic…
We focus attention on some particular thermodynamic relations (PTR). Using information theory concepts we show that, for a reversible process, microscopic considerations related to these PTR make the concomitant informational contents of…
The Kullback-Leibler inequality is a way of comparing any two density matrices. A technique to set up the density matrix for a physical system is to use the maximum entropy principle, given the entropy as a functional of the density matrix,…
In statistical thermodynamics the 2nd law is properly spelled out in terms of conditioned probabilities. As such it makes the statement, that `entropy increases with time' without preferring a time direction. In this paper I try to explain…
Temperature is an outsider in the laws of motion given by Newton and Einstein and this oversight is the source of the predictions of time-reversal-invariance made by these two great systems of motion. By taking into consideration Planck's…
The second law of classical thermodynamics, based on the positivity of the entropy production, only holds for deterministic processes. Therefore the Second Law in stochastic quantum thermodynamics may not hold. By making a fundamental…
The interrelationship between energy and probability conservation is explored from the point of view of statistical physics and non-relativistic quantum mechanics. The simultaneous validity of the law of conservation of energy and the…
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…
The dynamics of irreversible relaxation of non-equilibrium macroscopic systems is discussed. Arguments are developed showing that the general process is supported by two independent successive mechanisms. One is mixing and it follows pure…
Why can the world resist the law of entropy increase and produce self-organizing structure? Does the entropy of an isolated system always only increase and never decrease? Can be thermodymamic degradation and self-organizing evolution…
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…
This article is a short version of a longer article to appear in Physics Reports (cond-mat/9708200). The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of…
This thesis investigates the connection between quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory. Theories with structure similar to that of quantum theory are considered, mathematically described by the framework of "Generalized…
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…
It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium…
We provide a simple physical interpretation, in the context of the second law of thermodynamics, to the information inequality (a.k.a. the Gibbs' inequality, which is also equivalent to the log-sum inequality), asserting that the relative…