Related papers: Are the second law principles of Caratheodory and …

After presenting possible motives for fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, several attempts to beat this law are analyzed. The second law wins, but an interesting interpretation of it emerges. This interpretation uses the…

Two statements by von Neumann and a thought-experiment by Peres prompts a discussion on the notions of one-shot distinguishability, orthogonality, semi-permeable diaphragm, and their thermodynamic implications. In the first part of the…

We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…

We discuss a simple toy model which allows, in a natural way, for deriving central facts from thermodynamics such as its fundamental laws, including Carnot's version of the second principle. Our viewpoint represents thermodynamic systems as…

Jensen's Inequality (JIEQ) has proved to be a major tool to prove the consistency of various fluctuation theorems with the second law in microscopic thermodynamics. We show that the situation is far from clear and the reliance on the JIE…

We argue that on its face, entanglement theory satisfies laws equivalent to thermodynamics if the theory can be made reversible by adding certain bound entangled states as a free resource during entanglement manipulation. Subject to…

Thomson's formulation of the second law - no work can be extracted from a system coupled to a bath through a cyclic process - is believed to be a fundamental principle of nature. For the equilibrium situation a simple proof is presented,…

All presently available results lead to the conclusion that nonextensivity, in the sense of nonextensive statistical mechanics (i.e., $q \ne 1$), does {\it not} modify anything to the second principle of thermodynamics, which therefore…

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.…

A corollary of the third law of thermodynamics is that the heat capacities of a system approach zero as the temperature approaches absolute zero Kevin. Many have attempted to take the corollary as the third law, but two counterexamples has…

Equilibrium statistics of Hamiltonian systems is correctly described by the microcanonical ensemble, whereas canonical ones fail in the most interesting, mostly inhomogeneous, situations like phase separations or away from the thermodynamic…

The historical development of the Carnot cycle necessitated the construction of isothermal and adiabatic pathways within the cycle that were also mechanically "reversible" which lead eventually to the Kelvin-Clausius development of the…

Drawing on an analogy with the second law of thermodynamics for adiabatically isolated systems, Cover argued that data-processing inequalities may be seen as second laws for "computationally isolated systems," namely, systems evolving…

We show that the equations which describe irreversible evolution of a system can be derived from a variational principle. We suggest a Lagrangian, which depends on the properties of the normal and the so-called "mirror-image" system. The…

The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…

In this paper, through a criticism of what we call the paradigmatic view of thermodynamics, we aim at showing a new perspective attained in this matter. The generalization of heat as internal energy (generalization of the kinetic energy…

In the presence of feedback control by "Maxwell's demon," the second law of thermodynamics and the nonequilibrium equalities such as the Jarzynski equality need to be generalized. In this paper, we derive the generalized Jarzynski…

Landauer's principle, often regarded as the foundation of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths,…

The concept of {\it equivalent systems} from the thermodynamic point of view, originally introduced by Th. De Donder and I. Prigogine, is deeply investigated and revised. From our point of view, two systems are thermodynamically equivalent…

We investigate the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, in the cosmological scenario where dark energy interacts with both dark matter and radiation. Calculating separately the entropy variation for each fluid component…