Related papers: The Five Problems of Irreversibility
Halfway between the experiment and the focus group, between the quiz and a game, we have experienced a new format to "focus" on sustainability and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and its principles. Concepts as reversibility,…
Density functional theory (DFT) is an essential building block for modern theoretical physics, chemistry, and engineering, especially those concerning electronic properties. Through decades of development, various program packages for…
A recent paper (Phys. Rev A. 75, 022513 (2007), arXiv:cond-mat/0602020) challenges exact time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) on several grounds. We explain why these criticisms are either irrelevant or incorrect, and that TDDFT…
Large entropy fluctuations in a nonequilibrium steady state of classical mechanics were studied in extensive numerical experiments on a simple 2-freedom model with the so-called Gauss time-reversible thermostat. The local fluctuations (on a…
Proposals to solve the problems of quantum measurement via non-linear CPT-violating modifications of quantum dynamics are argued to provide a possible fundamental explanation for the irreversibility of statistical mechanics as well. The…
In recent years, a number of dynamical density functional theories (DDFTs) have been developed for describing the dynamics of the one-body density of both colloidal and atomic fluids. In the colloidal case, the particles are assumed to have…
We argue in favour of developing a comprehensive dynamical theory for rationalizing, predicting, designing, and machine learning nonequilibrium phenomena that occur in soft matter. To give guidance for navigating the theoretical and…
It is a common view in philosophy of physics that thermodynamics is a non-fundamental theory. This is motivated in particular by the fact that thermodynamics is considered to be a paradigmatic example for a theory that can be reduced to…
In this report we discuss the organization of different levels of nature and the corresponding space-time structures by the consideration of a particular problem of time irreversibility. The fundamental time irreversibility problem consists…
An attempt is made to de-mystify the apparent "paradox" between microscopic time revsersibility and macroscopic time irreversibility. It is our common experience that a hot cup of coffee cools down to room temperature and it never…
The laws of Physics are time-reversible, making no qualitative distinction between the past and the future -- yet we can only go towards the future. This apparent contradiction is known as the "arrow of time problem". Its current resolution…
We provide a dynamical proof of the second law of thermodynamics, along the lines of an argument of Penrose and Gibbs, making crucial use of the upper semicontinuity of the mean entropy proved by Robinson and Ruelle and Lanford and…
We attempt to characterize irreversibility of a dynamical system from the existence of different forward and backward mathematical representations depending on the direction of the time arrow. Such different representations have been…
The emergence of irreversibility in physical processes, despite the fundamentally reversible nature of quantum mechanics, remains an open question in physics. This thesis explores the intricate relationship between quantum mechanics and…
An unresolved problem in physics is how the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from an underlying time reversible dynamics. We contribute to this issue by developing a measure of time-symmetry breaking, and by using the work fluctuation…
I argue that the field equations of any theory of gravity which is diffeomorphism invariant must be expressible as a thermodynamic identity, TdS=dE around any event in the spacetime. This fact can be demonstrated explicitly (and rather…
Density functional theory (DFT) is the de facto approach for predicting self-consistent-field electronic structures of ground-state configurations of complex atoms, molecules, and solids and providing their property data for materials…
It is generally admitted in thermodynamics that, for a given change in volume, the work done by a system is greater in conditions of reversibility than in conditions of irreversibility. If the basic conventions of physics are strictly…
We examine the out-of-equilibrium dynamical evolution of density profiles of ultrasoft particles under time-varying external confining potentials in three spatial dimensions. The theoretical formalism employed is the dynamical density…
The classical Density Functional Theory (DFT) is introduced as an application of entropic inference for inhomogeneous fluids at thermal equilibrium. It is shown that entropic inference reproduces the variational principle of DFT when…