Related papers: Emergent second law for non-equilibrium steady sta…
The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas…
A general nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory is developed for time-dependent Langevin dynamics, starting from the common definition of nonequilibrium Gibbs entropy. It is shown that the notations appearing in the First and the Second Law…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
We provide an extension of a recent approach to study non-equilibrium thermodynamics [Phys. Rev. E 81, 051130 (2010), to be denoted by I in this work] to inhomogeneous systems by considering the latter to be composed of quasi-independent…
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…
We extend the canonical Gibbs distribution, originally formulated for systems at equilibrium, to systems driven out of equilibrium. The stochastic dynamics of a small system are described by a probability distribution over discrete energy…
We use rigorous non-equilibrium thermodynamic arguments to prove (i) the residual entropy of any system is bounded below by the experimentally (calorimetrically) determined absolute temperature entropy, which itself is bounded below by the…
The development of stochastic thermodynamics during the last decades prompted the discovery of novel nonequilibrium relations refining our understanding of the second law in small fluctuating systems and its connection with information…
Generalization through novel interpretations of the inner logic of the century-old Gibbs' statistical thermodynamics is presented: i) Identifying $k_B\to 0$ as classical energetics, one directly derives a pair of thermodynamic variational…
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 essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…
The mathematical physics of mechanical systems in thermal equilibrium is a well studied, and relatively easy, subject, because the Gibbs distribution is in general an adequate guess for the equilibrium state. On the other hand, the…
A theory for non-equilibrium systems is derived from a maximum entropy approach similar in spirit to the equilibrium theory given by Gibbs. Requiring Hamilton's principle of stationary action to be satisfied on average during a trajectory,…
The second law of ordinary thermodynamics and the second law of steady state thermodynamics, as proposed by Oono and Paniconi, are investigated from the microscopic point of view for the open quantum system. Based on the H-theorem of…
In quantum statistical mechanics, equilibrium states have been shown to be the typical states for a system that is entangled with its environment, suggesting a possible identification between thermodynamic and von Neumann entropies. In this…
We derive a generalization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that uses Bayesian updates to explicitly incorporate the effects of a measurement of a system at some point in its evolution. By allowing an experimenter's knowledge to be…
We establish the fluctuation theorem in the presence of information exchange between a nonequilibrium system and other degrees of freedom such as an observer and a feedback controller, where the amount of information exchange is added to…
A generalization of the Gibbs entropy postulate is proposed based on the BBGKY hierarchy as the nonequilibrium entropy for a system of N interacting particles. This entropy satisfies the basic principles of thermodynamics in the sense that…
We develop the argument that the Gibbs-von Neumann entropy is the appropriate statistical mechanical generalisation of the thermodynamic entropy, for macroscopic and microscopic systems, whether in thermal equilibrium or not, as a…
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…