Related papers: Entropy production as correlation between system a…
The entropy production is commonly interpreted as measuring the distance from equilibrium. However, this explanation lacks a rigorous description due to the absence of a natural equilibrium measure. The present analysis formalizes this…
The entropy production of an open system coupled to a reservoir initialized in a canonical state can be expressed as a sum of two microscopic information-theoretic contributions: the system-bath mutual information and the relative entropy…
We discuss fundamental features of the local expression for the entropy production rate of the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of open systems and its relations to memory effects and the spectrum of the generator of the dynamics. Defining…
Macroscopic many-body systems always exhibit irreversible behaviors together with the entropy increase. However, the underlying microscopic dynamics of the many-body system, either the (quantum) von Neumann or (classical) Liouville…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
The entropy production is one of the most essential features for systems operating out of equilibrium. The formulation for discrete-state systems goes back to the celebrated Schnakenberg's work and hitherto can be carried out when for each…
Recently, Di\'osi et al. (Int. J. Quant. Inf. 4, 99 (2006)) introduced a simple, yet very interesting model for reservoirs, in order to study the relationship between thermodynamic entropy production of a system and the corresponding von…
We explore the fundamental limits on thermodynamic irreversibility when cooling a quantum system in the presence of a finite-size reservoir. First, we prove that for any non-interacting $n$-particle reservoir, the entropy production…
The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…
Entropy production characterizes the thermodynamic irreversibility and reflects the amount of heat dissipated into the environment and free energy lost in nonequilibrium systems. According to the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, we…
As remarked by Boltzmann, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is notable for the fact that it is readily proved using elementary statistical arguments, but becomes harder and harder to verify the more precise the microscopic description of a…
Equilibrium thermodynamics is combined with Jarzynski's irreversible work theorem to quantify the excess entropy produced by irreversible processes. The resulting rectified form of the second law parallels the first law, in the sense that…
A generalization of the Gibbs entropy postulate is proposed based on the BBGKY hierarchy as the nonequilibrium entropy for a system of N interacting particles. This entropy satisfies the basic principles of thermodynamics in the sense that…
It is a great challenge of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to calculate entropy production within a microscopic theory. In the framework of linear irreversible thermodynamics, we combine the Mori-Zwanzig-Forster projection operator…
Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…
We use rigorous non-equilibrium thermodynamic arguments to prove (i) the residual entropy of any system is bounded below by the experimentally (calorimetrically) determined absolute temperature entropy, which itself is bounded below by the…
We analyze the time-resolved energy transport and the entropy production in ac-driven quantum coherent electron systems coupled to multiple reservoirs at finite temperature. At slow driving we formulate the first and second laws of…
An invariant state of a quantum Markov semigroup is an equilibrium state if it satisfies a quantum detailed balance condition. In this paper, we introduce a notion of entropy production for faithful normal invariant states of a quantum…
The entropy produced when a quantum system is driven away from equilibrium can be decomposed in two parts, one related with populations and the other with quantum coherences. The latter is usually based on the so-called relative entropy of…
In thermodynamics, entropy production and work quantify irreversibility and the consumption of useful energy, respectively, when a system is driven out of equilibrium. For quantum systems, these quantities can be identified at the…