Related papers: Second law, Landauer's Principle and Autonomous in…
The amount of work that is needed to change the state of a system in contact with a heat bath between specified initial and final nonequilibrium states is at least equal to the corresponding equilibrium free energy difference plus (resp.…
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…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
By considering an explicit nonequilibrium model, we analyze the statistics of the irreversible work, $w_{\rm irr}$, and irreversible entropy production, $\Delta_i s$, within the stochastic energetics framework. Restating the second law of…
New concepts from nonequilibrium thermodynamics are used to show that Landauer's principle can be understood in terms of time asymmetry in the dynamical randomness generated by the physical process of the erasure of digital information. In…
A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined…
We address a new setting where the second law is under question: thermalizations in a quantum superposition of causal orders, enacted by the so-called quantum switch. This superposition has been shown to be associated with an increase in…
According to classical Boltzmannian thermodynamics, the efficiency of a cyclic machine is strictly lower than one. Such a result is a straightforward consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics. Recent advances in the study of the…
The Landauer principle sets a fundamental thermodynamic constraint on the minimum amount of heat that must be dissipated to erase one logical bit of information through a quasi-statically slow protocol. For finite time information erasure,…
So far, feedback-driven systems have been discussed using (i) measurement and control, (ii) a tape interacting with a system or (iii) by identifying an implicit Maxwell demon in steady state transport. We derive the corresponding second…
We establish a refined version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for Langevin stochastic processes describing mesoscopic systems driven by conservative or non-conservative forces and interacting with thermal noise. The refinement is based…
Information thermodynamics relates the rate of change of mutual information between two interacting subsystems to their thermodynamics when the joined system is described by a bipartite stochastic dynamics satisfying local detailed balance.…
We establish the fluctuation theorem in the presence of information exchange between a nonequilibrium system and other degrees of freedom such as an observer and a feedback controller, where the amount of information exchange is added to…
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…
Landauer's principle introduces a symmetry between computational and physical processes: erasure of information, a logically irreversible operation, must be underlain by an irreversible transformation dissipating energy. Monitoring micro-…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…
Feedback or closed-loop control allows dynamical systems to increase their performance up to a limit imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. It is expected that within this limit, the system performance increases as the controller uses…