Related papers: Not All Fluctuations are Created Equal: Spontaneou…
We define thermodynamic configurations and identify two primitives of discrete quantum processes between configurations for which heat and work can be defined in a natural way. This allows us to uncover a general second law for any discrete…
We solve a set of selected exercises on rotational motion requiring a mechanical and thermodynamical analysis. When non-conservative forces or thermal effects are present, a complete study must use the first law of thermodynamics together…
All previously derived thermodynamic fluctuation theorems (FTs) that concern multiple co-evolving systems have required that each system can only change its state during an associated pre-fixed, limited set of time intervals. However, in…
Thermodynamics is usually formulated on the presumption that the observer has complete information about the system he/she deals with: no parasitic current, exact evaluation of the forces that drive the system. For example, the acclaimed…
A central result that arose in applying information theory to the stochastic thermodynamics of nonlinear dynamical systems is the Information-Processing Second Law (IPSL): the physical entropy of the universe can decrease if compensated by…
We review and investigate the general theory of thermodynamics of computation, and derive the fundamental inequalities that set the lower bounds of the work requirement and the heat emission during a computation. These inequalities…
We extend stochastic thermodynamics by relaxing the two assumptions that the Markovian dynamics must be linear and that the equilibrium distribution must be a Boltzmann distribution. We show that if we require the second law to hold when…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
Two recent topics on a formal thermodynamic analogy of intracellular diffusivity fluctuations observed experimentally in normal/anomalous diffusion are reported. Not only the analogs of the quantity of heat and work as well as the internal…
As early as 1867, two years after the introduction of the concept of entropy by Clausius, Maxwell showed that the limitations imposed by the second law of thermodynamics depend on the information that one possesses about the state of a…
Fluctuation theorems are a generalization of thermodynamics on small scales and provide the tools to characterize the fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities in non-equilibrium nanoscale systems. They are particularly important for…
It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium…
We show how statistical thermodynamics can be formulated in situations in which thermodynamics applies, while equilibrium statistical mechanics does not. A typical case is, in the words of Landau and Lifshitz, that of partial (or…
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
The second law of thermodynamics states that a system in contact with a heat bath can undergo a transformation if and only if its free energy decreases. However, the "if" part of this statement is only true when the effective heat bath is…
We report two results complementing the second law of thermodynamics for Markovian open quantum systems coupled to multiple reservoirs with different temperatures and chemical potentials. First, we derive a nonequilibrium free energy…
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…
Starting at the mesoscopic level with a general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics in terms of Markov jump processes, we identify the scaling conditions that ensure the emergence of a (typically nonlinear) deterministic dynamics and…
Information is physical but information is also processed in finite time. Where computing protocols are concerned, finite-time processing in the quantum regime can dynamically generate coherence. Here we show that this can have significant…
The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a fundamental result in statistical physics that establishes a connection between the response of a system subject to a perturbation and the fluctuations associated with observables in equilibrium.…