Related papers: Second law for an autonomous information machine c…
We analyze a periodic optimal finite-time two-state information-driven machine that extracts work from a single heat bath exploring imperfect measurements. Two models are considered, a memory-less one that ignores past measurements and an…
The Carnot theorem, one expression of the second law of thermodynamics, places a fundamental upper bound on the efficiency of heat engines operating between two heat baths. The Carnot theorem can be stated in a more generalized form for…
The first law of thermodynamics, which governs energy conservation, is traditionally formulated as an equality. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that the first law alone implies a universal Landauer-like inequality linking changes in system…
Bridging the second law of thermodynamics and microscopic reversible dynamics has been a longstanding problem in statistical physics. We here address this problem on the basis of quantum many-body physics, and discuss how the entropy…
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…
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…
The ``Gibbs Paradox'' refers to several related questions concerning entropy in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: whether it is an extensive quantity or not, how it changes when identical particles are mixed, and the proper way to…
With the approaching second quantum revolution, the study of quantum thermodynamics, particularly heat flow, has become even more relevant for two main reasons. First, understanding heat and other types of noise is essential for protecting…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
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…
As remarked by Boltzmann, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is notable for the fact that it is readily proved using elementary statistical arguments, but becomes harder and harder to verify the more precise the microscopic description of a…
Information engines can convert thermal fluctuations of a bath at temperature $T$ into work at rates of order $k_\mathrm{B}T$ per relaxation time of the system. We show experimentally that such engines, when in contact with a bath that is…
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…
Physical devices operating out of equilibrium are inherently affected by thermal fluctuations, limiting their operational precision. This issue is pronounced at microscopic and especially quantum scales and can only be mitigated by…
We consider a system model of a general finite-state machine (ratchet) that simultaneously interacts with three kinds of reservoirs: a heat reservoir, a work reservoir, and an information reservoir, the latter being taken to be a running…
We study the energy exchange between two bosonic systems that interact via bilinear transformations in the mode operators. The first mode is considered as the thermodynamic system, while the second is regarded as the bath. This work finds…
We argue that the entanglement entropy for a very small subsystem obeys a property which is analogous to the first law of thermodynamics when we excite the system. In relativistic setups, its effective temperature is proportional to the…
We establish that entropy production, which is crucial to the characterization of thermodynamic irreversibility, is obtained through a variational principle involving the Kulback-Leibler divergence. A simple application of this…
We illustrate in terms familiar to modern day science students that: (i) an uncertainty slope mechanism underlies the usefulness of temperature via its reciprocal, which is incidentally around 42 [nats/eV] at the freezing point of water;…
We present a fluctuation theorem for quantum bipartite systems in which the subsystems exchange information with each other. Our information fluctuation theorem includes correlations by introducing a quantum mechanical mutual information…