Related papers: Second law of thermodynamics at stopping times
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
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…
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…
We treat a quantum mechanical system with certain general properties which are expected to be common in macroscopic quantum systems. Starting from a PURE initial state (which may not describe an equilibrium) in which energy is mildly…
It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
Concepts of everyday use like energy, heat, and temperature have acquired a precise meaning after the development of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics provides the basis for understanding how heat and work are related and with the general…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
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…
Systems of stochastic particles evolving in a multi-well energy landscape and attracted to their barycenter is the prototypical example of mean-field process undergoing phase transitions: at low temperature, the corresponding mean-field…
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…
We give meaning to the first and second laws of thermodynamics in case of mesoscopic out-of-equilibrium systems which are driven by diffusion processes. The notion of the entropy production is analyzed. The role of the Helmholtz extremum…
It is shown that one of consequences of basic principle of quantum mechanics at the mesoscopic level is violation of the second law of thermodynamics and that an experimental evidence of this violation was obtained long ago.
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…
The limits of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which reigns undisputed in the macroscopic world, are investigated at the mesoscopic level, corresponding to spatial dimensions of a few microns. An extremely simple isolated system, modeled…
Master equation could be applied to model various kinds of biochemical systems. A general theory for its time-dependent nonequilibrium thermodynamics is rigorously derived. We not only introduce a concept of general internal energy, but…
Evidence implies that basic laws of thermodynamics must be tested by experiments. In this paper, an experiment is designed to measure the entropy of a system with at least one known (measurable) equation of state, especially the gas…