Related papers: Second law, Landauer's Principle and Autonomous in…

Multi-component molecular machines are ubiquitous in biology. We review recent progress on describing their thermodynamic properties using autonomous bipartite Markovian dynamics. The first and second laws can be split into local versions…

For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…

A new thermodynamic inequality is derived which leads to the maximum work that can be extracted from multi-heat baths with the assistance of discrete quantum feedback control. The maximum work is determined by the free-energy difference and…

This article is a short version of a longer article to appear in Physics Reports (cond-mat/9708200). The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of…

We investigate thermodynamics of feedback processes driven by measurement. Regarding system and memory device as a composite system, mutual information as a measure of correlation between the two constituents contributes to the entropy of…

In this paper I apply newly-proposed information-theoretic principles to thermodynamic work extraction. I show that if it is possible to extract work deterministically from a physical system prepared in any one of a set of states, then…

We present an experiment in which a one-bit memory is constructed, using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential. We measure the amount of heat dissipated to erase a bit and we establish that in…

In thermodynamics one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer's erasure principle, which states that the erasure of 1 bit of information requires a minimum…

Feedback control mechanisms are ubiquitous in science and technology, and play an essential role in regulating physical, biological and engineering systems. The standard second law of thermodynamics does not hold in the presence of…

Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…

After presenting possible motives for fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, several attempts to beat this law are analyzed. The second law wins, but an interesting interpretation of it emerges. This interpretation uses the…

A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…

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…

Fundamental limits on the controllability of physical systems are discussed in the light of information theory. It is shown that the second law of thermodynamics, when generalized to include information, sets absolute limits to the minimum…

The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…

We derive a generalization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that uses Bayesian updates to explicitly incorporate the effects of a measurement of a system at some point in its evolution. By allowing an experimenter's knowledge to be…

Events in mesoscopic systems often take place at first-passage times, as is for instance the case for a colloidal particle that escapes a metastable state. An interesting question is how much work an external agent has done on a particle…

In the real world, one almost never knows the parameters of a thermodynamic process to infinite precision. Reflecting this, here we investigate how to extend stochastic thermodynamics to systems with uncertain parameters, including…

It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…

Thermodynamics, and in particular its first law, is of fundamental importance to Science, and therefore of great general interest to all physicists. The first law, although undoubtedly true, and believed by everyone to be true because of…