Related papers: The second law and beyond in microscopic quantum s…

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…

Besides the growing interest in old concepts like temperature and entropy at the nanoscale, theories of relaxation and transport have recently regained a lot of attention. With the electronic circuits and computer chips getting smaller and…

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…

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…

For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…

We consider a situation where an $N$-level system (NLS) is coupled successively to two heat baths with different temperatures without being necessarily thermalized and approaches a steady state. For this situation we apply a general…

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…

Jensen's Inequality (JIEQ) has proved to be a major tool to prove the consistency of various fluctuation theorems with the second law in microscopic thermodynamics. We show that the situation is far from clear and the reliance on the JIE…

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…

In an abstract setting of a general classical mechanical system as a model for the universe we set up a general formalism for a law behind the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. really for "initial conditions". We propose a unification with…

We present an analysis of the foundations of the well known Clausius inequality. It is shown that, strictly speaking, the inequality is not a logical consequence of the Kelvin-Planck formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Some…

We treat a quantum mechanical system with certain general properties which are expected to be common in macroscopic quantum systems. Starting from a PURE initial state (which may not describe an equilibrium) in which energy is mildly…

Carath\'eodory's formalism for classical thermodynamics is a rich alternative approach to this theory, although unpopular with students and physics professors. This approach dispenses with the content of thermal machines for the…

We define thermodynamic configurations and identify two primitives of discrete quantum processes between configurations for which heat and work can be defined in a natural way. This allows us to uncover a general second law for any discrete…

We relate Newton's Second Law with the Second Law of Thermodynamics through the analysis of a simple model introducing a dynamic pressure concept. From this analyses we can clarify some conceptual problems resulting from several concepts of…

A unification of thermodynamics and information theory is proposed. It is argued that similarly to the randomness due to collisions in thermal systems, the quenched randomness that exists in data files in informatics systems contributes to…

Macroscopic nonextensive thermodynamics is studied without recourse to microscopic statistical mechanics. It is shown that if entropy is nonextensive, the concept of physical temperature introduced through the generalized zeroth law of…

The second law of thermodynamics is the cornerstone of physics, characterizing the convertibility between thermodynamic states through a single function, entropy. Given the universal applicability of thermodynamics, a fundamental question…

In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be…

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…