Related papers: The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy-Decre…
We elucidate the microscopic quantum mechanism of superfluid $^4$He by uncovering a novel characteristic of its many-body energy levels. At temperature below the transition point, the system's low-lying levels exhibit a fundamental grouping…
The example provided in the comment [arXiv:0803.2241] concerns a situation where the system is initially at negative temperature. It is known that in such cases the Law of Entropy Decrease holds. Nevertheless, this does not challenge the…
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
Based on the theory of the thermodynamic equilibrium in a system of quantum vortices in superfluids in the presence of a counterflow, the influence of a vortex tangle on various thermodynamic phenomena in quantum liquids is studied. Using…
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system is non-decreasing. Discussing the Second Law in the quantum world poses new challenges and provides new opportunities, involving fundamental…
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat flows spontaneously from a high-temperature entity to a lower-temperature one. Yet, recent advances have demonstrated that quantum correlations between a system and its thermal environment…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
We report a counter-intuitive self-heating effect of helium-4 superflow. This fundamentally unusual heating effect bears a phenomenological resemblance to the Peltier effect of electric current across two different conductors. It reveals…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
The classical Second Law of Thermodynamics demands that an isolated system evolves with a non-diminishing entropy. This holds as well in quantum mechanics if the evolution of the energy-isolated system can be described by a unital quantum…
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 analyze the time-resolved energy transport and the entropy production in ac-driven quantum coherent electron systems coupled to multiple reservoirs at finite temperature. At slow driving we formulate the first and second laws of…
Microcanonical Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics on one hand to closed finite and even small systems and on the other to the largest,self-gravitating ones. However, one has to reconsider the fundamental…
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…
Thermal management is a key challenge, both globally and microscopically in integrated circuits and quantum technologies. The associated heat flow $I_Q$ has been understood since the advent of thermodynamics by a process of elimination,…
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…
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…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…