Related papers: Does the second law of thermodynamics really hold …
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
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…
Active Brownian engines rectify energy from reservoirs composed of self-propelling non-equilibrium molecules into work. We consider a class of such engines based on an underdamped Brownian particle trapped in a power-law potential. The…
The concept of entropy has been pivotal in the formulation of thermodynamics. For systems driven away from thermal equilibrium, a comparable role is played by entropy production and dissipation. Here we provide a comprehensive picture how…
It has long been known that, fundamentally different from a large body of rarefied gas, when a Knudsen gas is immersed in a thermal bath, it may never reach thermal equilibrium. The root cause is nonchaoticity: as the particle-particle…
The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
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…
The interest in the concept of entropic forces has risen considerably since E. Verlinde proposed to interpret the force in Newton s second law and Gravity as entropic forces [1]. Brownian motion, the motion of a small particle (pollen)…
We consider the entropy production of a strongly coupled bipartite system. The total entropy production can be partitioned into various components, which we use to define local versions of the Second Law that are valid without the usual…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
It is shown that a recently proposed model for the gravitational interaction in non relativistic quantum mechanics may turn to be relevant to the derivation of the second law of thermodynamics. In particular, the spreading of the…
We investigate the nonequilibrium steady-state thermodynamics of single Brownian macromolecules with inertia under feedback control in isothermal ambient fluid. With the control being represented by a velocity-dependent external force, we…
We present some novel thermodynamic ideas based on the Maupertuis principle. By considering Hamiltonians written in terms of appropriate action-angle variables we show that thermal states can be characterized by the action variables and by…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
In the real world, one almost never knows the parameters of a thermodynamic process to infinite precision. Reflecting this, here we investigate how to extend stochastic thermodynamics to systems with uncertain parameters, including…
We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…
We improve on our version of the second law of thermodynamics as a deterministic theorem for quantum spin systems in two basic aspects. The first concerns the general statement of the second law: spontaneous changes in an adiabatically…