Related papers: Reversible temperature exchange upon thermal conta…

The aim of this paper is to determine lost works in a molecular engine and compare results with macro (classical) heat engines. Firstly, irreversible thermodynamics are reviewed for macro and molecular cycles. Secondly, irreversible…

We prove a lower bound on the relative entropy between two finite-dimensional states in terms of their entropy difference and the dimension of the underlying space. The inequality is tight in the sense that equality can be attained for any…

According to conventional wisdom, a system placed in an environment with a different temperature tends to relax to the temperature of the latter, mediated by the flows of heat and/or matter that are set solely by the temperature difference.…

By the standard second law of thermodynamics, heat spontaneously flows from a hotter body to a colder body. However, quantum systems in which quantum correlations play a prominent role can exhibit a non-classical reversal of such heat flow.…

We study first-order phase transitions in a two-temperature system, where due to the time-scale separation all the basic thermodynamical quantities (free energy, entropy, etc) are well-defined. The sign of the latent heat is found to be…

We show that states of macroscopic systems with purported absolute negative temperatures are not stable under small, yet arbitrary, perturbations. We prove the previous statement using the fact that, in equilibrium, the entropy takes its…

Thermodynamics (in concert with its sister discipline, statistical physics) can be regarded as a data reduction scheme based on partitioning a total system into a subsystem and a bath that weakly interact with each other. The ubiquity and…

We present a detailed derivation of heat radiation, heat transfer and (Casimir) interactions for N arbitrary objects in the framework of fluctuational electrodynamics in thermal non-equilibrium. The results can be expressed as…

Considering a system of non-interacting particles characterized by the number N of its constituents and by its Kelvin temperature T, we reduce the transformation of the Kelvin temperature to the transformation mass

The irreversibility and thermalization of many-body systems can be attributed to the erasure of spread non-equilibrium state information by local operations. This thermalization mechanism can be demonstrated by the sequence of…

A critical analysis of the feasibility of reversible computing is performed. The key question is: Is it possible to build a completely reversible computer? A closer look into the internal aspects of the reversible computing as well as the…

We study thermal diffusion in binary mixtures in the framework of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Our formal result displays the role of partial enthalpies and Onsager's generalized mobilities. The mobility ratio provides a measure for the…

Even though irreversibility is one of the major hallmarks of any real life process, an actual understanding of irreversible processes remains still mostly semiempirical. In this paper we formulate a thermodynamic uncertainty principle for…

Present-day thermodynamics has long outgrown the initial frames of the heat-engine theory and transmuted into a rather general macroscopic method for studying kinetics of various transfer processes in their inseparable connection with the…

We discuss a simple toy model which allows, in a natural way, for deriving central facts from thermodynamics such as its fundamental laws, including Carnot's version of the second principle. Our viewpoint represents thermodynamic systems as…

Using a block of three separated solid elements, a thermal source and drain together with a gate made of an insulator-metal transition material exchanging near-field thermal radiation, we introduce a nanoscale analog of a field-effect…

Temperature in a simple thermodynamical system is not limited from above. It is also widely believed that it does not make sense talking about temperatures higher than the Planck temperature in the absence of the full theory of quantum…

We show that an increasingly strong thermal rectification effect occurs in the thermodynamic limit in a one-dimensional, graded rotor lattice with nearest-neighboring interactions only. The underlying mechanism is related to the transition…

The wide-spread opinion is that original quantum mechanics is a reversible theory, but this statement is only true for undecomposed systems, that are those systems which sub-systems are out of consideration. Taking sub-systems into account,…

Two identical finite quantum systems prepared initially at different temperatures, isolated from the environment, and subsequently brought into contact are demonstrated to relax towards Gibbs-like quasi-equilibrium states with a common…