Related papers: Thermodynamic constraints on fluctuation phenomena
Stochastic field theories are often constructed phenomenologically, without a systematic assessment of thermodynamic consistency or local detailed balance. This may hinder a physical description of irreversibility at the field-theoretic…
We demonstrate that the Gibbs-Shannon entropy is applicable to non-equilibrium systems of any size and boundary conditions. The change in microscopic entropy can be attributed to the stochastic nature of dynamic processes and to the…
Recently, there has been a considerable progress on the issue of the thermodynamic second law, which is known as the law of entropy increase or irreversibility. In particular, a novel symmetry known as the Gallavotti-Cohen symmetry is found…
A few decades after Hill's work on nano-thermodynamics, the development of a thermodynamic framework, to account consistently for the fluctuations of small systems due to their interactions with the surrounding environment, is still…
The heat theorem (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics or the existence of entropy) is a manifestation of a general property of hamiltonian mechanics and of the ergodic Hypothesis. In nonequilibrium thermodynamics of stationary states the…
We formulate a geometric framework in which physical laws emerge from restricted access to microscopic information. Measurement constraints are modeled as a gauge symmetry acting on density operators, inducing a gauge-reduced space of…
Thermodynamics is usually formulated on the presumption that the observer has complete information about the system he/she deals with: no parasitic current, exact evaluation of the forces that drive the system. For example, the acclaimed…
Statistical thermodynamics is valuable as a conceptual structure that shapes our thinking about equilibrium thermodynamic states. A cloud of unresolved questions surrounding the foundations of the theory could lead an impartial observer to…
All previously derived thermodynamic fluctuation theorems (FTs) that concern multiple co-evolving systems have required that each system can only change its state during an associated pre-fixed, limited set of time intervals. However, in…
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…
The postulational basis of classical thermodynamics has been expanded to incorporate equilibrium fluctuations. The main additional elements of the proposed thermodynamic theory are the concept of quasi-equilibrium states, a definition of…
It has been suggested recently that `$q$-exponential' distributions which form the basis of Tsallis' non-extensive thermostatistical formalism may be viewed as mixtures of exponential (Gibbs) distributions characterized by a fluctuating…
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…
The limit of small entropy production is reached in relaxing systems long after preparation, and in stationary driven systems in the limit of small driving power. Surprisingly, for extended systems this limit is not in general the…
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…
It is pointed out that the constraint to be imposed to the maximization of the entropy for processes outside the class of thermodynamical systems, is generally not well defined. In fact, any probability distribution can be derived from…
It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…
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 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 <…
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…