Related papers: Second Thoughts on the Second Law
Clausius' statement of the second law of thermodynamics reads: Heat will flow spontaneously from a hot to cold reservoir. This statement should hold for transport of energy through a quantum network composed of small subsystems each coupled…
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat flows spontaneously from a high-temperature entity to a lower-temperature one. Yet, recent advances have demonstrated that quantum correlations between a system and its thermal environment…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
A central result that arose in applying information theory to the stochastic thermodynamics of nonlinear dynamical systems is the Information-Processing Second Law (IPSL): the physical entropy of the universe can decrease if compensated by…
Landauer's principle states that information erasure requires heat dissipation. Landauer's original result focused on equilibrium memories. We here investigate the reset of information stored in a nonequilibrium state of a symmetric…
We analyze an engine whose working fluid consists of a single quantum particle, paralleling Szilard's construction of a classical single-particle engine. Following his resolution of Maxwell's Second Law paradox using the latter, which…
The third law of thermodynamics has a controversial past and a number of formulations due to Planck, Einstein, and Nernst. It's most accepted version, the unattainability principle, states that "any thermodynamic process cannot reach the…
Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy,…
A classical and quantum mechanical generalized second law of thermodynamics in cosmology implies constraints on the effective equation of state of the universe in the form of energy conditions, obeyed by many known cosmological solutions,…
We study entropy production in nanoscale devices, which are coupled to finite heat baths. This situation is of growing experimental relevance, but most theoretical approaches rely on a formulation of the second law valid only for infinite…
Traditional discussions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics studied the limits of very specific types of devices, such as heat engines, chemical reactions, and molecules channeled by valves. Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0110422)…
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 review the fundamental properties of the quantum relative entropy for finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In particular, we focus on several inequalities that are related to the second law of thermodynamics, where the positivity and the…
Our main models of computation (the Turing Machine and the RAM) make fundamental assumptions about which primitive operations are realizable. The consensus is that these include logical operations like conjunction, disjunction and negation,…
It is generally accepted, following Landauer and Bennett, that the process of measurement involves no minimum entropy cost, but the erasure of information in resetting the memory register of a computer to zero requires dissipating heat into…
Landauer's erasure principle states that the irreversible erasure of a one-bit memory, embedded in a thermal environment, is accompanied with a work input of at least $k_{\text{B}}T\ln2$. Fundamental to that principle is the assumption that…
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…
All computation is physically embedded. Reflecting this, a growing body of results embraces rate equations as the underlying mechanics of thermodynamic computation and biological information processing. Strictly applying the implied…
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like…
A new thermodynamic inequality is derived which leads to the maximum work that can be extracted from multi-heat baths with the assistance of discrete quantum feedback control. The maximum work is determined by the free-energy difference and…