Related papers: Second laws under control restrictions
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…
Thermalization processes degrade the states of any working medium, turning any initial state into a passive state from which no work can be extracted. Recently, it has been shown that this degradation can be avoided if two identical…
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…
We consider a particular instance of the lift of controlled systems recently proposed in the theory of irreversible thermodynamics and show that it leads to a variational principle for an optimal control in the sense of Pontryagin. Then we…
I give a self-contained introduction to the resource theory approach to quantum thermodynamics. I will introduce in an elementary manner the technical machinery necessary to unpack and prove the core statements of the theory. The topics…
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…
For a two-level quantum mechanical system, we derive microscopically the exact expression for the fluctuation of microscopic work in a multi-step non-equilibrium process, and we rigorously prove that in an isothermal process, the…
Based on recent data about the history of the Hubble factor, it is argued that the second law of thermodynamics holds at the largest scales accessible to observation. This is consistent with previous studies of the same question.
We derive a bound on the efficiency of thermal engines that can be sharper than Carnot's limit. It is a function of statistical correlations between the engine internal state and Hamiltonian, can be saturated even in finite-time cycles, and…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
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…
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 second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…
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…
Thermodynamics is a branch of science blessed by an unparalleled combination of generality of scope and formal simplicity. Based on few natural assumptions together with the four laws, it sets the boundaries between possible and impossible…
A physical system is said to satisfy a thermal area law if the mutual information between two adjacent regions in the Gibbs state is controlled by the area of their boundary. Thermal area laws have been derived for systems with bounded…
In this report I discuss fluctuation theorems and transient violations of the second law of thermodynamics in small systems. Special emphasis is placed on free-energy recovery methods in the framework of non-equilibrium single-molecule…
Resource theories are a generic approach used to manage any valuable resource, such as entanglement, purity, and asymmetry. Such frameworks are characterized by two main elements: a set of predefined (free) operations and states, that one…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
At the dawn of thermodynamics, Carnot's constraint on efficiency of heat engines stimulated the formulation of one of the most universal physical principles, the second law of thermodynamics. In recent years, the field of heat engines…