Related papers: Does the second law of thermodynamics really hold …
Many theoretical expressions of dissipation along non-equilibrium processes have been proposed. However, they have not been fully verified by experiments. Especially for systems strongly interacting with environments the connection between…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
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…
We consider a single harmonic oscillator coupled to a bath at zero temperature. As is well known, the oscillator then has a higher average energy than that given by its ground state. Here we show analytically that for a damping model with…
The condition of thermal equilibrium simplifies the theoretical treatment of fluctuations as found in the celebrated Einstein's relation between mobility and diffusivity for Brownian motion. Several recent theories relax the hypothesis of…
We consider a system of two Brownian particles (say A and B), coupled to each other via harmonic potential of stiffness constant $k$. Particle-A is connected to two heat baths of constant temperatures $T_1$ and $T_2$, and particle-B is…
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the revolutionary contributions to physics by Einstein, I am happy to respond to a problem posed by him in 1905. He said: In this paper it will be shown that according to the…
We investigate the unified first law and the generalized second law in a modified holographic dark energy model. The thermodynamical analysis on the apparent horizon can work and the corresponding entropy formula is extracted from the…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…
We argue that the entanglement entropy for a very small subsystem obeys a property which is analogous to the first law of thermodynamics when we excite the system. In relativistic setups, its effective temperature is proportional to the…
With the discussion of three examples, we aim at clarifying the concept of energy transfer associated with dissipation in mechanics and in thermodynamics. The dissipation effects due to dissipative forces, such as the friction force between…
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…
Thermodynamic entropy is determined by a heat measurement through the Clausius equality. The entropy then formalizes a fundamental limitation of operations by the second law of thermodynamics. The entropy is also expressed as the Shannon…
The quantum thermodynamic behavior of small systems is investigated in presence of finite quantum dissipation. We consider the archetype cases of a damped harmonic oscillator and a free quantum Brownian particle. A main finding is that…
We prove the second law of thermodynamics and the nonequilibirum fluctuation theorem for pure quantum states.The entire system obeys reversible unitary dynamics, where the initial state of the heat bath is not the canonical distribution but…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
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…
The classical thermodynamic laws fail to capture the behavior of systems with energy Hamiltonian which is an explicit function of the temperature. Such Hamiltonian arises, for example, in modeling information processing systems, like…