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Concepts like `typicality' and the `eigenstate thermalization hypothesis' aim at explaining the apparent equilibration of quantum systems, possibly after a very long time. However, these concepts are not concerned with the specific way in…
The linear response to temperature changes is derived for systems with overdamped stochastic dynamics. Holding both in transient and steady state conditions, the results allow to compute nonequilibrium thermal susceptibilities from…
The thermal or equilibrium ensemble is one of the most ubiquitous states of matter. For models comprised of many locally interacting quantum particles, it describes a wide range of physical situations, relevant to condensed matter physics,…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
Time evolution of a perturbed thermal state is studied in a quantum-mechanical system with O(N) symmetry. In the limit of large N, time dependence of O(N)-singlet expectation values can be described by classical equations of motion in a…
We prove that the transport of any differentiable scalar observable in $d$-dimensional non-equilibrium systems is bounded from above by the total entropy production scaled by the amount the observation "stretches" microscopic coordinates.…
The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…
To describe the nonequilibrium states of a system we introduce a new thermodynamic parameter - the lifetime of a system. The statistical distributions which can be obtained out of the mesoscopic description characterizing the behaviour of a…
The most peculiar, specifically quantum, features of quantum mechanics --- quantum nonlocality, indeterminism, interference of probabilities, quantization, wave function collapse during measurement --- are explained on a logical-geometrical…
This article sets up a new formalism to investigate stochastic thermodynamics in the quantum regime, where stochasticity and irreversibility primarily come from quantum measurement. In the absence of any bath, we define a purely quantum…
A paradigm for isothermal, mechanical rectification of stochastic fluctuations is introduced in this paper. The central idea is to transform energy injected by random perturbations into rigid-body rotational kinetic energy. The prototype…
Depending on the exact experimental conditions, the thermodynamic properties of physical systems can be related to one or more thermostatistical ensembles. Here, we survey the notion of thermodynamic temperature in different statistical…
This article sets up a new formalism to investigate stochastic thermodynamics of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems, where stochasticity primarily comes from quantum measurement. In the absence of any bath, we define a purely quantum…
Conventional thermo-statistics address infinite homogeneous systems within the canonical ensemble. However, some 170 years ago the original motivation of thermodynamics was the description of steam engines, i.e. boiling water. Its essential…
Classical thermodynamics treats temperature as a state variable characterizing systems in equilibrium with idealized infinite reservoirs. We argue that this framing, while computationally exact, obscures an essential physical reality: any…
Why is thermalisation a universal phenomenon? How does a quantum system reach thermodynamical equilibrium? These questions are not new, dating even from the very birth of quantum theory and have been the subject of a renewed interest over…
The transition from a many-body localized phase to a thermalizing one is a dynamical quantum phase transition which lies outside the framework of equilibrium statistical mechanics. We provide a detailed study of the critical properties of…
We show that when the thermal wavelength is comparable to the spatial size of a system, thermodynamic observables like Pressure and Volume have quantum fluctuations that cannot be ignored. They are now represented by operators; conventional…
The proper definition of entropy is fundamental to the relationship between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. It also plays a major role in the recent debate about the validity of the concept of negative temperature. In this paper,…
Emergence of one-time-direction macroscopic evolution of a classical system of two mixed gases having different temperatures is derived and explained. The analysis performed at the microscopic level, where the time-symmetric laws of…