Related papers: Second law and Landauer principle far from equilib…
The second law of thermodynamics states that a system in contact with a heat bath can undergo a transformation if and only if its free energy decreases. However, the "if" part of this statement is only true when the effective heat bath is…
The first law of thermodynamics, which governs energy conservation, is traditionally formulated as an equality. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that the first law alone implies a universal Landauer-like inequality linking changes in system…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
We use the work done on and the heat removed from a system to maintain it in a nonequilibrium steady state for a thermodynamic-like description of such a system as well as of its fluctuations. Based on a generalized Onsager-Machlup theory…
We study entropy production in nanoscale devices, which are coupled to finite heat baths. This situation is of growing experimental relevance, but most theoretical approaches rely on a formulation of the second law valid only for infinite…
Using the operational framework of completely positive, trace preserving operations and thermodynamic fluctuation relations, we derive a lower bound for the heat exchange in a Landauer erasure process on a quantum system. Our bound comes…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
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…
In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be…
A known aspect of the Clausius inequality is that an equilibrium system subjected to a squeezing $\d S$ of its entropy must release at least an amount $|\dbarrm Q|=T|\d S|$ of heat. This serves as a basis for the Landauer principle, which…
Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
A general nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory is developed for time-dependent Langevin dynamics, starting from the common definition of nonequilibrium Gibbs entropy. It is shown that the notations appearing in the First and the Second Law…
Stochastic dynamics with random resetting leads to a non-equilibrium steady state. Here, we consider the thermodynamics of resetting by deriving the first and second law for reset processes far from equilibrium. We identify the…
Equilibrium thermodynamics is grounded in the law of energy conservation, with a specific focus on how systems exchange energy with their environment during transitions between equilibrium states. These transitions are typically…
An apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics occurs when an atom coupled to a zero-temperature bath, being necessarily in an excited state, is used to extract work from the bath. Here the fallacy is that it takes work to couple…
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…
We consider the Non-Equilibrium Steady State induced by two infinite quantum thermal reservoirs at different temperatures and derive an inequality giving the upper bound of the work extracted by cyclic operations. This upper bound tends to…