Related papers: On the origin of thermality
Exposing a solution to a temperature gradient can lead to the accumulation of particles on either the cold or warm side. This phenomenon, known as thermophoresis, has been discovered more than a century ago, and yet its microscopic origin…
We use rigorous non-equilibrium thermodynamic arguments to prove (i) the residual entropy of any system is bounded below by the experimentally (calorimetrically) determined absolute temperature entropy, which itself is bounded below by the…
It is often incorrectly assumed that the number of microstates \Omega (E,V,N,...) available to an isolated system can have arbitrary dependence on the extensive variables E,V,N, .... However, this is not the case for natural systems which…
(abbreviated) The statistical mechanics of self-gravitating systems is a long-held puzzle. In this work, we employ a phenomenological entropy form of ideal gas, first proposed by White & Narayan, to revisit this issue. By calculating the…
Chapter 3 of S. Lloyd's 1988 Ph.D. thesis, `Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information and what they do with it,' supervisor Heinz Pagels. Reformulates statistical mechanics in terms of pure states…
A diathermal wall between two heat baths at different temperatures can be mimicked by a layer of independent spin pairs with some internal energy and where each spin $\sigma_a$ is flipped by thermostat $a$ ($a=1,2$). The transition rates…
The comparison of geometrical properties of black holes with classical thermodynamic variables reveals surprising parallels between the laws of black hole mechanics and the laws of thermodynamics. Since Hawking's discovery that black holes…
We discuss the matching of the BPS part of the spectrum for (super)membrane, which gives the possibility of getting membrane's results via string calculations. In the small coupling limit of M--theory the entropy of the system coincides…
We show that there exists a natural way to define a condition of generalized thermal equilibrium between systems governed by Tsallis thermostatistics, under the hypotheses that i) the coupling between the systems is weak, ii) the structure…
A generally relativistic theory of thermodynamics is developed, based on four main physical principles: heat is a local form of energy, therefore described by a thermal energy tensor; conservation of mass, equivalent to conservation of…
We study thermalization within a quantum system with an enhanced capacity to store information. This system has been recently introduced to provide a prototype model of how a black hole processes and stores information. We perform a…
We extend the theory of stochastic thermodynamics in three directions: (i) instead of a continuously monitored system we consider measurements only at an arbitrary set of discrete times, (ii) we allow for imperfect measurements and…
String theory and ``quantum geometry'' have recently offered independent statistical mechanical explanations of black hole thermodynamics. But these successes raise a new problem: why should models with such different microscopic degrees of…
In this paper we calculate the entropy of a thin spherical shell that contracts reversibly from infinity down to its event horizon. We find that, for a broad class of equations of state, the entropy of a non-extremal shell is one-quarter of…
Through the consideration of spherically symmetric gravitating systems consisting of perfect fluids with linear equation of state constrained to be in a finite volume, an account is given of the properties of entropy at conditions in which…
The extension of equilibrium thermodynamics to non-equilibrium systems is based on the assumption of "local equilibrium," followed by the assumption that an entropy-density function may be defined, and that this entropy-density would have…
A complete mathematical theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics of stochastic systems in terms of master equations is presented. As generalizations of isothermal entropy and free energy, two functions of states play central roles: the Gibbs…
Several approximations are made to study the microcanonical formalism that are valid in the thermodynamics limit. Usually it is assumed that: 1)Stirling approximation can be used to evaluate the number of microstates; 2) the surface entropy…
We consider a situation where an $N$-level system (NLS) is coupled successively to two heat baths with different temperatures without being necessarily thermalized and approaches a steady state. For this situation we apply a general…
For students familiar with equilibrium statistical mechanics, the notion of a positive specific heat, being intimately related to the idea of stability, is both intuitively reasonable and mathematically provable. However, for system in…