Related papers: Detecting temperature fluctuations at equilibrium
Fluctuations of the excess heat in an out of equilibrium steady state are experimentally investigated in two stochastic systems : an electric circuit with an imposed mean current and a harmonic oscillator driven out of equilibrium by a…
Do negative absolute temperatures matter physics and specifically Statistical Physics? We provide evidence that we can certainly answer positively to this vexata quaestio. The great majority of models investigated by statistical mechanics…
When dealing with certain kind of complex phenomena the theoretician may face some difficulties -- typically a failure to have access to information for properly characterize the system -- for applying the full power of the standard…
Small systems in contact with a heat bath evolve by stochastic dynamics. Here we show that, when one such small system is weakly coupled to another one, it is possible to infer the presence of such weak coupling by observing the violation…
We introduce a quantum stochastic dynamics for heat conduction. A multi-level subsystem is coupled to reservoirs at different temperatures. Energy quanta are detected in the reservoirs allowing the study of steady state fluctuations of the…
The fluctuation-dissipation relation is usually formulated for a system interacting with a heat bath at finite temperature in the context of linear response theory, where only small deviations from the mean are considered. We show that for…
Heat can flow from cold to hot at any phase separation. Therefore Lynden-Bell's gravo-thermal catastrophe must be reconsidered. The original objects of Thermodynamics, the separation of phases at first order phase transitions, like boiling…
We use the quantum Brownian model to derive the uncertainty relation for a quantum open system. We examine how the fluctuations of a quantum system evolve after it is brought in contact with a heat bath at finite temperature. We study the…
Understanding the physics of non-equilibrium systems remains as one of the major open questions in statistical physics. This problem can be partially handled by investigating macroscopic fluctuations of key magnitudes that characterise the…
The postulational basis of classical thermodynamics has been expanded to incorporate equilibrium fluctuations. The main additional elements of the proposed thermodynamic theory are the concept of quasi-equilibrium states, a definition of…
We study temperature fluctuations in mesoscopic $N$-body systems undergoing non-equilibrium processes from the perspective of stochastic thermodynamics. By introducing a stochastic differential equation, we describe the evolution of the…
The theory of small-system thermodynamics was originally developed to extend the laws of thermodynamics to length scales of nanometers. Here we review this "nanothermodynamics," and stress how it also applies to large systems that subdivide…
The theory of superstatistics is a generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics which admits temperature fluctuations, and generates non-canonical ensembles from the distribution function of these fluctuations. Recently, some…
Stochastic thermodynamics as reviewed here systematically provides a framework for extending the notions of classical thermodynamics like work, heat and entropy production to the level of individual trajectories of well-defined…
The equipartition theorem states that in equilibrium thermal energy is equally distributed among uncoupled degrees of freedom which appear quadratically in the system's Hamiltonian. However, for spatially coupled degrees of freedom --- such…
The relationships between reversible Carnot cycles, the absence of perpetual motion machines and the existence of a non-decreasing, globally unique entropy function forms the starting point of many textbook presentations of the foundations…
Fluctuations in conjugate thermodynamic variables are studied using the cross-correlation function. A new procedure is given enabling the derivation of fluctuation formulas for a system in equilibrium. Specifically, the cross-correlation…
Based on the view that thermal equilibrium should be characterized through macroscopic observations, we develop a general theory about typicality of thermal equilibrium and the approach to thermal equilibrium in macroscopic quantum systems.…
The explicit thermodynamic functions, in particular, the specific heat of a spin system interacting with a spin bath which exerts finite dissipation on the system are determined. We show that the specific heat is a sum of the products of a…
We consider heat exchange processes between non-equilibrium aging systems (in their activated regime) and the thermal bath in contact. We discuss a scenario where two different heat exchange processes concur in the overall heat dissipation:…