Related papers: Emergent second law for non-equilibrium steady sta…
We examine the question of whether the formal expressions of equilibrium statistical mechanics can be applied to time independent non-dissipative systems that are not in true thermodynamic equilibrium and are nonergodic. By assuming the…
The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…
Macroscopic fluctuation theory has shown that a wide class of non-equilibrium stochastic dynamical systems obey a large deviation principle, but except for a few one-dimensional examples these large deviation principles are in general not…
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…
Statistical mechanics can only be ultimately justified in terms of microscopic dynamics (classical, quantum, relativistic, or any other). It is known that Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics is based on the hypothesis of exponential sensitivity to…
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…
We provide a simple physical interpretation, in the context of the second law of thermodynamics, to the information inequality (a.k.a. the Gibbs' inequality, which is also equivalent to the log-sum inequality), asserting that the relative…
Fluctuation theorems impose fundamental bounds in the statistics of the entropy production, with the second law of thermodynamics being the most famous. Using information theory, we quantify the information of entropy production and find an…
Gibbs states play a central role in quantum statistical mechanics as the standard description of thermal equilibrium. Traditionally, their use is justified either by a heuristic, a posteriori reasoning, or by derivations based on notions of…
Validity of local equilibrium has been questioned for non-equilibrium systems which are characterized by delayed response. In particular, for systems with non-zero thermodynamic inertia, the assumption of local equilibrium leads to negative…
A mapping of nonextensive statistical mechanics into Gibbs' statistical mechanics exists, which leads to a generalization of Einstein's formula for fluctuations. A unified treatment of stability of relaxed states in nonextensive statistical…
This is the fourth paper, the last one, on solution to the problem of absence of detailed balance in nonequilibrium processes. It is an approach based on another known universal dynamics: The evolutionary dynamics first conceived by Darwin…
The entropy production rate is a key quantity in non-equilibrium thermodynamics of both classical and quantum processes. No universal theory of entropy production is available to date, which hinders progress towards its full grasping. By…
We introduce the concept of {\em information compressibility}, $K_I$, which measures the relative change of number of available microstates of an open system in response to an energy variation. We then prove that at the time in which the…
In this paper, we suppose a possible extension of Gibbs ensemble theory so that it can provide a reasonable description to phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The extension is founded on three hypotheses, and can be…
We discuss the consequences of a variant of the Hatano-Sasa relation in which a non-stationary distribution is used in place of the usual stationary one. We first show that this non-stationary distribution is related to a difference of…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
We show how to construct non-equilibrium thermodynamics for systems too small to be considered thermodynamically in a traditional sense. Through the use of a non-equilibrium ensemble of many replicas of the system which can be viewed as a…
To describe the nonequilibrium states of a system we introduce a new thermodynamic parameter - the lifetime (the first passage time) of a system. The statistical distributions that can be obtained out of the mesoscopic description…
The second law of thermodynamics in nonextensive statistical mechanics is discussed in the quantum regime. Making use of the convexity property of the generalized relative entropy associated with the Tsallis entropy indexed by q, Clausius'…