Related papers: Nonequilibrium thermodynamics at the microscale: W…
The relation between the work performed to a system and the change of its free energy during a certain process is important in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. In particular, the work relation with measurement and feedback control has…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
Thermodynamic implications of anisotropic gas-surface interactions in a closed molecular flow cavity are examined. Anisotropy at the microscopic scale, such as might be caused by reduced-dimensionality surfaces, is shown to lead to…
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…
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…
We formulate thermodynamical relations based on the field degrees of freedom by introducing a work induced by the volume change in the function space, in addition to the usual work associated with the spatial volume change. The first and…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system is almost always increasing. We propose combinatorial formalizations of the second law and explore their conditions of possibilities.
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…
The example of macroscopic thermodynamical system violating the Clausius inequality is presented.
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…
Thermodynamics is traditionally constrained to the study of macroscopic systems whose energy fluctuations are negligible compared to their average energy. Here, we push beyond this thermodynamic limit by developing a mathematical framework…
The laws of thermodynamics provide a clear concept of the temperature for an equilibrium system in the continuum limit. Meanwhile, the equipartition theorem allows one to make a connection between the ensemble average of the kinetic energy…
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 <…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
The status of heat and work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is quite confusing and non-unique at present with conflicting interpretations even after a long history of the first law in terms of exchange heat and work, and is far from…
Thermodynamics makes definite predictions about the thermal behavior of macroscopic systems in and out of equilibrium. Statistical mechanics aims to derive this behavior from the dynamics and statistics of the atoms and molecules making up…
The resource theory of thermal operations, an established model for small-scale thermodynamics, provides an extension of equilibrium thermodynamics to nonequilibrium situations. On a lattice of any dimension with any translation-invariant…
The second law of ordinary thermodynamics and the second law of steady state thermodynamics, as proposed by Oono and Paniconi, are investigated from the microscopic point of view for the open quantum system. Based on the H-theorem of…
Fluctuation theorems are fundamental results in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Considering the fluctuation theorem with respect to the entropy production and an observable, we derive a new thermodynamic uncertainty relation which also…
The second law of thermodynamics posits that in closed macroscopic systems the rate of entropy production must be positive. However, small systems can exhibit negative entropy production over short timescales, seemingly in contradiction…