English
Related papers

Related papers: Quantum superposition of thermodynamic evolutions …

200 papers

Time-asymmetric spacetime structures, in particular those representing black holes and the expansion of the universe, are intimately related to other arrows of time, such as the second law and the retardation of radiation. The nature of the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2017-11-22 H. D. Zeh

Microscopic quantum laws are time-symmetric: nothing in the Schr\"odinger equation or its relativistic extensions distinguishes future from past. Yet measurements produce irreversible records, an apparently one-way causal flow, and the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-02 Alejandro Frank

Frauchiger and Renner recently cast doubt on the universal applicability of Quantum Mechanics [1]. In the following, it is pointed out that their conclusion of one of three common-sense conditions, demanded for Quantum Mechanics, being…

General Physics · Physics 2020-04-23 Knud Thomsen

We demonstrate that in quantum many-body systems, local arrows of time can differ from the global time $t$ induced by Hamiltonian evolution. That is, within a quantum many-body system, the flow of time can be relative to each observer or by…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-14 Andrew G. Yates , Jordan Cotler , Nishad Maskara , Mikhail D. Lukin

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-02-19 Balint Szabo

Fluctuation theorems are relations constraining the out-of-equilibrium fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities like the entropy production that were initially introduced for classical or quantum systems in contact with a thermal bath. Here…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-02-27 Sreenath K. Manikandan , Cyril Elouard , Andrew N. Jordan

Time remains one of the least well understood concepts in physics, most notably in quantum mechanics. A central goal is to find the fundamental limits of measuring time. One of the main obstacles is the fact that time is not an observable…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-08-08 Paul Erker , Mark T. Mitchison , Ralph Silva , Mischa P. Woods , Nicolas Brunner , Marcus Huber

We show for a large class of interacting particle systems that whenever the stationary measure is not reversible for the dynamics, then the mean entropy production in the steady state is strictly positive. This extends to the thermodynamic…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-26 C. Maes , F. Redig , M. Verschuere

This article presents a heuristic combination of the local and global formulations of the second law of thermodynamics that suggests the possibility of theoretical existence of thermodynamics processes with positive and negative entropy…

General Physics · Physics 2010-12-06 Jose Iraides Belandria

We investigate the origin of the arrow of time in quantum mechanics in the context of quantum cosmology. The ``Copenhagen'' quantum mechanics of measured subsystems incorporates a fundamental arrow of time. Extending discussions of…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-09-25 Murray Gell-Mann , James B. Hartle

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2008-11-26 Piotr Garbaczewski

The existence of small amounts of advanced radiation, or a tilt in the arrow of time, makes the basic equations of physics mixed-type functional differential equations. The novel features of such equations point to a microphysical structure…

General Physics · Physics 2008-08-12 C. K. Raju

We investigate two types of temporal symmetry in quantum mechanics. The first type, time symmetry, refers to the inclusion of opposite time orientations on an equivalent physical footing. The second, event symmetry, refers to the inclusion…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-12-22 Michael Ridley , Emily Adlam

Recently David Jennings and Terry Rudolph published two papers as reaction on Maccone's paper "Quantum Solution to the Arrow-of-Time Dilemma". In these papers, the authors suppose that second law of thermodynamics is not relevant for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2013-05-01 Oleg Kupervasser

Although most fundamental laws are invariant under time reversal, experience exhibits the presence of irreversible phenomena -- the arrows of time. Their origin lies in cosmology, and I argue that only quantum cosmology can provide the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2007-05-23 Claus Kiefer

We propose a new approach concerning the introduction of time-irreversibility in statistical mechanics. It is based on a transition function defined in terms of path integral and verifying a time-irreversible equation. We show first how…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-03-02 J. P. Badiali

The transition probability for time-dependent unitary evolution is invariant under the reversal of protocols just as in the classical Liouvillian dynamics. In this article, we generalize the expression of microscopic reversibility to…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-28 Takaaki Monnai

Here we investigate the impact of temporal entanglement on a system's ability to perform thermodynamical work. We show that while the quantum version of the Jarzynski equality remains satisfied even in the presence of temporal entanglement,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2012-04-26 Vlatko Vedral

We introduce a continuous time-reversal operation which connects the time-forward and time-reversed trajectories in the steady state of an irreversible Markovian dynamics via a continuous family of stochastic dynamics. This continuous…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-01-10 Andreas Dechant , Shin-ichi Sasa

We analyze the equilibrium space of an ideal gas using the formalism of geometrothermodynamics. We introduce the concept of thermodynamic geodesics to show that the equilibrium space around a particular initial state can be divided into two…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-10-11 Hernando Quevedo