Related papers: Irreversibility and typicality: A simple analytica…
This article aims at revisiting, with the aid of simple and neat numerical examples, some of the basic features of macroscopic irreversibility, and, thus, of the mechanical foundation of the second principle of thermodynamics as drawn by…
We make precise sense of the idea of "molecular chaos" through algorithmic randomness of microscopic trajectories, and ground macroscopic irreversibility in the lack of symmetry under time reversal of this property. This concept of…
We introduce a deterministic, time-reversible version of the Ehrenfest urn model. The distribution of first-passage times from equilibrium to non-equilibrium states and vice versa is calculated. We find that average times for transition to…
The microscopic onset of irreversibility is finally becoming an experimental subject. Recent experiments on microscopic open and even isolated systems have measured statistical properties associated with entropy production, and…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
Irreversibility is commonly quantified by entropy production. An external observer can estimate it through measuring an observable that is antisymmetric under time-reversal like a current. We introduce a general framework that, inter alia,…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…
We suggest a certain statistical interpretation for the entropy produced in driven thermodynamic processes. The exponential function of half irreversible entropy re-weights the probability of the standard Ornstein-Uhlenbeck-type…
Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that…
In stochastic thermodynamics, the entropy production of a thermodynamic system is defined by the irreversibility measured by the logarithm of the ratio of the path probabilities in the forward and reverse processes. We derive the relation…
How is the irreversibility of a high-dimensional chaotic system controlled by the heterogeneity in the non-reciprocal interactions among its elements? In this paper, we address this question using a stochastic model of random recurrent…
The existence of the {\em typical set} is key for data compression strategies and for the emergence of robust statistical observables in macroscopic physical systems. Standard approaches derive its existence from a restricted set of…
Statistical Mechanics deals with ensembles of microstates that are compatible with fixed constraints and that on average define a thermodynamic macrostate. The evolution of a small system is normally subjected to changing constraints and…
We examine stochastic processes that are used to model nonequilibrium processes (e.g, pulling RNA or dragging colloids) and so deliberately violate detailed balance. We argue that by combining an information-theoretic measure of…
The irreversibility in a statistical system is traced to its probabilistic evolution, and the molecular chaos assumption is not its unique consequence as is commonly believed. Under the assumption that the rate of change of the each…
The appealing theoretical measure of irreversibility in a stochastic process, as the ratio of the probabilities of a trajectory and its time reversal, cannot be accessed directly in experiment since the probability of a single trajectory is…
Through extended consideration of two wide classes of case studies -- dilute gases and linear systems -- I explore the ways in which assumptions of probability and irreversibility occur in contemporary statistical mechanics, where the…
When describing the effective dynamics of an observable in a many-body system, the repeated randomness assumption, which states that the system returns in a short time to a maximum entropy state, is a crucial hypothesis to guarantee that…
We assume that markovian dynamics on a finite graph enjoys a gauge symmetry under local scalings of the probability density, derive the transformation law for the transition rates and interpret the thermodynamic force as a gauge potential.…
In the framework of statistical mechanics the properties of macroscopic systems are deduced starting from the laws of their microscopic dynamics. One of the key assumptions in this procedure is the ergodic property, namely the equivalence…