Related papers: Second Thoughts on the Second Law

Second law of thermodynamics is applied to a few electronic processes. It is seen that the second law of thermodynamics holds good for all except one mentioned here. The classical approach, based on exact equivalence of emission and…

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…

We propose one of the very few constructive consequences of the second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, we present protocols for secret-key establishment and multiparty computation the security of which is based fundamentally on…

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…

Computations implemented on a physical system are fundamentally limited by the laws of physics. A prominent example for a physical law that bounds computations is the Landauer principle. According to this principle, erasing a bit of…

In an Information machine system's dynamics gets affected by the attached information reservoir. Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for this case. In this article we have derived second law for an information machine,…

We provide a simple physical interpretation, in the context of the second law of thermodynamics, to the information inequality (a.k.a. the Gibbs' inequality, which is also equivalent to the log-sum inequality), asserting that the relative…

All presently available results lead to the conclusion that nonextensivity, in the sense of nonextensive statistical mechanics (i.e., $q \ne 1$), does {\it not} modify anything to the second principle of thermodynamics, which therefore…

Information is central to thermodynamics, providing the grounds to the formulation of the theory in powerful abstract statistical terms. One must not forget, however, that, as put by Landauer, {\it information is physical}. This means that…

Landauer's principle gives a fundamental limit to the thermodynamic cost of erasing information. Its saturation requires a reversible isothermal process, and hence infinite time. We develop a finite-time version of Landauer's principle for…

The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…

We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…

Thermodynamics connects our knowledge of the world to our capability to manipulate and thus to control it. This crucial role of control is exemplified by the third law of thermodynamics, Nernst's unattainability principle, which states that…

There are several formulations of the second law, and they may, in principle, have different domains of validity. Here a simple mathematical theorem is proven which serves as the most general basis for the second law, namely the Thomson…

It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium…

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system is non-decreasing. Discussing the Second Law in the quantum world poses new challenges and provides new opportunities, involving fundamental…

Understanding how much energy is needed and dissipated as heat for a given computational system and for a given program is a physically interesting and practically important problem. However, the thermodynamic costs of computational systems…

We prove the second law of thermodynamics and the nonequilibirum fluctuation theorem for pure quantum states.The entire system obeys reversible unitary dynamics, where the initial state of the heat bath is not the canonical distribution but…

Landauer's Principle that information loss from a computation implies entropy increase can be rigorously proved from mathematical physics. However, carefully examining its detailed formulation reveals that the traditional identification of…

Several models of quantum open systems are known at present to violate, according to principles of the standard quantum theory of open systems, the second law of thermodynamics. Here, a new and rather trivial model of another type is…