Related papers: What decides the direction of a current?

We find there are at least two different steady states for transport across noncollinear magnetic multilayers. In the conventional one there is a discontinuity in the spin current across the interfaces which has been identified as the…

What is time? Why does it "flow" and why are we sure that it flows from past towards future? Why is there such a gigantic distinction between the Past of our world, which we believe to be fixed, and the Future, which we consider…

An expression for the conductance of interacting electrons in the diffusive regime as a function of the ensemble averaged persistent current and the compressibility of the system is presented. This expression involves only ground-state…

Thermodynamic principles are often deceptively simple and yet surprisingly powerful. We show how a simple rule, such as the net flow of energy in and out of a moving atom under nonequilibrium steady state condition, can expose the…

The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…

The Fluctuation Theorems are a group of exact relations that remain valid irrespective of how far the system has been driven away from equilibrium. Other than having practical applications, like determination of equilibrium free energy…

In nature stationary nonequilibrium systems cannot exist on their own, rather they need to be driven from outside in order to keep them away from equilibrium. While the internal mean entropy of such stationary systems is constant, the…

We introduce and study a deterministic lattice model describing the motion of an infinite system of oppositely charged particles under the action of a constant electric field. As an application this model represents a traffic flow of cars…

Thermodynamics is based on the notions of energy and entropy. While energy is the elementary quantity governing physical dynamics, entropy is the fundamental concept in information theory. In this work, starting from first principles, we…

Two-dimensional driven dissipative flows are generally integrable via a conservation law that is singular at equilibria. Nonintegrable dynamical systems are confined to n*3 dimensions. Even driven-dissipative deterministic dynamical systems…

Near equilibrium, thermodynamic intuition suggests that fast, irreversible processes will dissipate more energy and entropy than slow, quasistatic processes connecting the same initial and final states. Here, we test the hypothesis that…

We derive an exact (classical and quantum) expression for the entropy production of a finite system placed in contact with one or several finite reservoirs each of which is initially described by a canonical equilibrium distribution.…

We use fluctuating hydrodynamics to analyze the dynamical properties in the non-equilibrium steady state of a diffusive system coupled with reservoirs. We derive the two-time correlations of the density and of the current in the…

Given a thermodynamic process which carries a system from one equilibrium state to another, we construct a quantity whose average, over an ensemble of microscopic realizations of the process, depends only on these end states, even if at…

We consider a dynamic model of traffic that has received a lot of attention in the past few years. Users control infinitesimal flow particles aiming to travel from an origin to a destination as quickly as possible. Flow patterns vary over…

Non-equilibrium physics is a particularly fascinating field of current research. Generically, driven systems are gradually heated up so that quantum effects die out. In contrast, we show that a driven central spin model including controlled…

Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…

This article presents a heuristic combination of the local and global formulations of the second law of thermodynamics that suggests the possibility of theoretical existence of thermodynamics processes with positive and negative entropy…

In Maxwellian electrodynamics, specific properties of the responses to external fields are included in constitutive equations. For noncentrosymmetric semiconductors, spin conductivity can be expressed in terms of the contribution of…

We study the steady-state current in a minimal model for a quantum dot dominated by charge fluctuations and analytically describe the time evolution into this state. The current is driven by a finite bias voltage V across the dot, and two…