Related papers: Large Deviation implies First and Second Laws of T…
In classical phenomenological thermodynamics the first and second laws can be regarded as independent statements. Statistical mechanics provides a microscopic substratum that explains thermodynamics in probabilistic terms via a microstate…
In earlier work we presented a foundation for the Second Law of Classical Thermodynamics in terms of the Entropy Principle. More precisely, we provided an empirically accessible axiomatic derivation of an entropy function defined on all…
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…
Thermodynamics makes definite predictions about the thermal behavior of macroscopic systems in and out of equilibrium. Statistical mechanics aims to derive this behavior from the dynamics and statistics of the atoms and molecules making up…
The recent experimental realization of exotic matter states in isolated quantum systems and the ensuing controversy about the existence of negative absolute temperatures demand a careful analysis of the conceptual foundations underlying…
Macroscopic thermodynamics of equilibrium is constructed for systems obeying power-law canonical distributions. With this, the connection between macroscopic thermodynamics and microscopic statistical thermodynamics is generalized. This is…
We discuss the consequences of a variant of the Hatano-Sasa relation in which a non-stationary distribution is used in place of the usual stationary one. We first show that this non-stationary distribution is related to a difference of…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
In a thermodynamical process, the dissipation or production of entropy can only be positive or zero according to the second law of thermodynamics. However the laws of thermodynamics are applicable to large systems in the thermodynamic…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
The microscopic derivation of the second law for macroscopic system is given under the phenomenological assumption that both the initial and final states are described by mutually different canonical ensembles. In particular, it is also…
The evolution of a driven quantum system is said to be adiabatic whenever the state of the system stays close to an instantaneous eigenstate of its time-dependent Hamiltonian. The celebrated quantum adiabatic theorem ensures that such pure…
We study driven finite quantum systems in contact with a thermal reservoir in the regime in which the system changes slowly in comparison to the equilibration time. The associated isothermal adiabatic theorem allows us to control the full…
A definition of the thermodynamic entropy based on the time-dependent probability distribution of the macroscopic variables is developed. When a constraint in a composite system is released, the probability distribution for the new…
We improve on our version of the second law of thermodynamics as a deterministic theorem for quantum spin systems in two basic aspects. The first concerns the general statement of the second law: spontaneous changes in an adiabatically…
Based only on classical Hamiltonian dynamics, we prove the maximum work principle in a system where macroscopic dynamical degrees of freedom are intrinsically coupled to microscopic degrees of freedom. Unlike recent identities between…
We describe recent progress towards deriving the Fundamental Laws of thermodynamics (the 0th, 1st and 2nd Law) from nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics in simple, yet physically relevant models. Along the way, we clarify some basic…
We investigate steady states of macroscopic quantum systems under dissipation not obeying the detailed balance condition. We argue that the Gibbs state at an effective temperature gives a good description of the steady state provided that…
We show how the macroscopic state variables pressure, entropy and temperature of equilibrium thermodynamics can be consistently derived from the (quantum) chaotic spectral structure of one or two particles in two-dimensional domains. This…
As in thermodynamics, the celebrated first law of black hole mechanics relates infinitesimal changes in the properties of nearby equilibrium states of black holes (without reference to any physical process that causes the transition). Using…