Related papers: Characterizing irreversibility in open quantum sys…
Time-reversal symmetry breaking and entropy production are universal features of nonequilibrium phenomena. Despite its importance in the physics of active and living systems, the entropy production of systems with many degrees of freedom…
We demonstrate that irreversibility arises from the principle of microscopic reversibility and the presence of memory in the time evolution of a single copy of a system driven by a protocol. We introduce microscopic reversibility by using…
Some interactions between classical or quantum fields and matter are known to be irreversible processes. Here we associate an entropy to the electromagnetic field from well-known notions of statistical quantum mechanics, in particular the…
Various quantum thermodynamic bounds are shown to stem from a single tighter and more general inequality, consequence of the operator concavity of the logarithmic function. Such an inequality, which we call the "thermodynamic reverse…
Time irreversibility, defined as the lack of invariance of the statistical properties of a system or time series under the operation of time reversal, has received an increasing attention during the last decades, thanks to the information…
Thermodynamic irreversibility is a fundamental concept in statistical physics, yet its experimental measurement remains challenging, especially for complex systems. We introduce a novel random coarse-graining framework to identify…
Understanding the emergence of the thermodynamic arrow of time in microscopic systems is of fundamental importance, particularly given that unitary evolution preserves time-reversal symmetry. While projective measurements introduce temporal…
The entropy production rate (EPR), a key measure of thermodynamic irreversibility in stochastic thermodynamics, is difficult to determine directly in experiments, motivating lower-bound-based estimation from observations. However, a…
In classical thermodynamic processes the unavoidable presence of irreversibility, quantified by the entropy production, carries two energetic footprints: the reduction of extractable work from the optimal, reversible case, and the…
It has been argued that gravity acts dissipatively on quantum-mechanical systems, inducing thermal fluctuations that become indistinguishable from quantum fluctuations. This has led some authors to demand that some form of time…
In finite-dimensional quantum systems, temperature cannot be uniquely defined. This, in turn, implies that there are several ways to define entropy production in finite-dimensional quantum systems, because the classical entropy production…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
We elaborate on the existing notion that quantum mechanics is an emergent phenomenon, by presenting a thermodynamical theory that is dual to quantum mechanics. This dual theory is that of classical irreversible thermodynamics. The linear…
Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of isolated quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic…
The physical foundations of a variety of emerging technologies --- ranging from the applications of quantum entanglement in quantum information to the applications of nonequilibrium bulk and interface phenomena in microfluidics, biology,…
We present a model in which, due to the quantum nature of the signals controlling the implementation time of successive unitary computational steps, \emph{physical} irreversibility appears in the execution of a \emph{logically} reversible…
The irreversible work during a driving protocol constitutes one of the most widely studied measures in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, as it constitutes a proxy for entropy production. In quantum systems, it has been shown that the…
Irreversible behaviour is traditionally associated with open stochastic dynamical systems, but an asymmetry in the probabilistic specification of a closed deterministic system can similarly lead to a disparity between the likelihoods of a…
We discussed the criterion for usefully comparing an irreversible cycle with a reversible one, and show that the lost work cannot be determined by the usual cycle diagrams, contrary to what has been found in the literature. To better…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…