Related papers: Work as a Memory Record
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…
Quantum dynamics controlled by a time-dependent coupling constant are studied. It is proven that an energy eigenstate expectation value of work done by the system in a quench process cannot exceed the work in the corresponding quasi-static…
Regarded as one of the most fundamental concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, work has received well-grounded definitions within the quantum framework since the 1970s, having being successfully applied to many contexts. Recent…
The relation between the work performed to a system and the change of its free energy during a certain process is important in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. In particular, the work relation with measurement and feedback control has…
Thermodynamics, which describes vast systems, has been reconciled with small scales, relevant to single-molecule experiments, in resource theories. Resource theories have been used to model exchanges of energy and information. Recently,…
Thermodynamics of nanoscale devices is an active area of research. Despite their noisy surround- ing they often produce mechanical work (e.g. micro-heat engines) or display rectified Brownian motion (e.g. molecular motors). This invokes the…
We study the constraints on reciprocal and non-reciprocal many-body radiative heat transfer imposed by symmetry and the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the symmetry of such a many-body system in general forms a magnetic group,…
Fluctuation theorems are fundamental extensions of the second law of thermodynamics for small nonequilibrium systems. While work and heat are equally important forms of energy exchange, fluctuation relations have not been experimentally…
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…
After presenting possible motives for fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, several attempts to beat this law are analyzed. The second law wins, but an interesting interpretation of it emerges. This interpretation uses the…
Thermodynamics teaches that if a system initially off-equilibrium is coupled to work sources, the maximum work that it may yield is governed by its energy and entropy. For finite systems this bound is usually not reachable. The maximum…
People are well aware that, inherently, certain small-scale nonchaotic particle movements are not governed by thermodynamics. Usually, such phenomena are studied by kinetic theory and their energy properties are considered "trivial". In…
The resource theory of quantum thermodynamics has been a very successful theory and has generated much follow-up work in the community. It requires energy-preserving unitary operations to be implemented over a system, bath, and catalyst as…
Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we propose an information-theoretic formalization of bounded rational decision-making…
Quantum information engines leverage information as a thermodynamic resource to facilitate energy conversion. In the operation of such engines, the information flow between the working substance and the controller is pivotal, however,…
Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded…
For processes during which a macroscopic system exchanges no heat with its surroundings, the second law of thermodynamics places two lower bounds on the amount of work performed on the system: a weak bound, expressed in terms of a…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
We reconsider a well-known relationship between the fluctuation theorem and the second law of thermodynamics by evaluating a probability measure-valued process. In order to establish a bridge between microscopic and macroscopic behaviors,…