Related papers: Second Thoughts on the Second Law

Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…

We consider the statistical irreversibility and its compatibility with the reversible dynamics. The role played by the observation is analyzed in detail. It makes our previous proof for the second law of thermodynamics clearer. On this…

Quantum thermodynamics investigates how robust the second law of thermodynamics serves as the unique fundamental law in the small quantum world. To tackle this problem, the quantum coherence constitutes a major difficulty of investigations,…

I argue here that both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about certain types of information without the need to invoke…

Landauer's principle states that the logical irreversibility of an operation, such as erasing one bit, whatever its physical implementation, necessarily implies its thermodynamical irreversibility. In this paper, a very simple…

The second law of thermodynamics constitutes a fundamental principle of physics, precluding the existence of perpetual motion machines and providing a natural definition of the arrow of time. Its scope extends across virtually all areas of…

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…

We briefly address Landauer's Principle and some related issues in thermal demons. We show that an error-free Turing computer works in the zero-entropy limit, which proves Landauer's derivation incorrect. To have a physical logic gate,…

We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…

The possibility of a controlled manipulation with molecules at the nanoscale allows us to gain net work from thermal energy, although this seems to be in contradiction to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Any manipulation, however, causes…

We show that the conservation and the non-additivity of the information, together with the additivity of the entropy make the entropy increase in an isolated system. The collapse of the entangled quantum state offers an example of the…

Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…

The second law of thermodynamics states that a system in contact with a heat bath can undergo a transformation if and only if its free energy decreases. However, the "if" part of this statement is only true when the effective heat bath is…

Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…

The Kullback-Leibler inequality is a way of comparing any two density matrices. A technique to set up the density matrix for a physical system is to use the maximum entropy principle, given the entropy as a functional of the density matrix,…

Connections between information theory and thermodynamics have proven to be very useful to establish bounding limits for physical processes. Ideas such as Landauer's erasure principle and information assisted work extraction have greatly…

Landauer's principle states that the erasure of one bit of information requires the free energy kT ln 2. We argue that the reliability of the bit erasure process is bounded by the accuracy inherent in the statistical state of the energy…

A restricted form of Landauer's Principle, independent of computational considerations, is shown to hold for thermal systems by reference to the joint entropy associated with conjugate observables. It is shown that the source of the…

Classical and quantum error correction are presented in the form of Maxwell's demon and their efficiency analyzed from the thermodynamic point of view. We explain how Landauer's principle of information erasure applies to both cases. By…

Adiabatic measurements, followed by feedback and erasure protocols, have often been considered as a model to embody Maxwell's Demon paradox and to study the interplay between thermodynamics and information processing. Such studies have led…