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Understanding the thermodynamics of the duplication process is a fundamental step towards a comprehensive physical theory of biological systems. However, the immense complexity of real cells obscures the fundamental tensions between energy…
Thermodynamics is a well developed tool to study systems in equilibrium but no such general framework is available for non-equilibrium processes. Only hope for a quantitative description is to fall back upon the equilibrium language as…
Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…
Recent experiments have implemented resetting by means of an external trap, whereby a system relaxes to the minimum of the trap and is reset in a finite time. In this work, we set up and analyse the thermodynamics of such a protocol. We…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
We show a new mechanism to extract energy from non-equilibrium fluctuations typical of periodically driven non-Hermitian systems. The transduction of energy between the driving force and the system is revealed by an \emph{anomalous}…
For students familiar with equilibrium statistical mechanics, the notion of a positive specific heat, being intimately related to the idea of stability, is both intuitively reasonable and mathematically provable. However, for system in…
We consider a general discrete state-space system with both unidirectional and bidirectional links. In contrast to bidirectional links, there is no reverse transition along the unidirectional links. Herein, we first compute the statistical…
Given a thermodynamic process which carries a system from one equilibrium state to another, we construct a quantity whose average, over an ensemble of microscopic realizations of the process, depends only on these end states, even if at…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
A unified view on macroscopic thermodynamics and quantum transport is presented. Thermodynamic processes with an exchange of energy between two systems necessarily involve the flow of other balanceable quantities. These flows are first…
For a two-level quantum mechanical system, we derive microscopically the exact expression for the fluctuation of microscopic work in a multi-step non-equilibrium process, and we rigorously prove that in an isothermal process, the…
Firstly, we calculate quantitatively decrease of entropy by the known formulas in the ordering phenomena and nucleation of thermodynamics of microstructure. They show again that a necessary condition of decrease of entropy in isolated…
The thermodynamic uncertainty relation expresses a universal trade-off between precision and entropy production, which applies in its original formulation to current observables in steady-state systems. We generalize this relation to…
We extend and successfully apply a recently proposed microstate nonequilibrium thermodynamics to study expansion/contraction processes. Here, the numbers of initial and final microstates are different so they cannot be connected by unique…
A consistent description of simultaneous heat and particle transport, including cross effects, and the associated entropy balance is given in the framework of a deterministic dynamical system. This is achieved by a multibaker map where,…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
We investigate and ascertain the ideal inputs to any finite-time thermodynamic process. We demonstrate that the expectation values of entropy flow, heat, and work can all be determined via Hermitian observables of the initial state. These…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…