Related papers: Decomposing the local arrow of time in interacting…
Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the…
The spread of the time arrows from the environment to an observed subsystem is followed within a harmonic model. A similarity is pointed out between irreversibility and a phase with spontaneously broken symmetry. The causal structure of…
Temporal irreversibility, often referred to as the arrow of time, is a fundamental concept in statistical mechanics. Markers of irreversibility also provide a powerful characterisation of information processing in biological systems.…
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…
Usually, it is supposed that irreversibility of time appears only in macrophysics. Here, we attempt to introduce the microphysical arrow of time assuming that at a fundamental level nature could be non-associative. Obtaining numerical…
Active matter encompasses systems whose individual consituents dissipate energy to exert propelling forces on their environment. This rapidly developing field harbors a dynamical phenomenology with no counterpart in passive systems. The…
Within the general formalism of quantum theory irreversibility and the arrow of time in the evolution of various physical systems are studied. Irreversible behavior often manifests itself in the guise of entropy production. This motivates…
We investigate implications of decoherence for quantum systems which are classically chaotic. We show that, in open systems, the rate of von Neumann entropy production quickly reaches an asymptotic value which is: (i) independent of the…
In [Sch05a], it is argued that Boltzmann's intuition, that the psychological arrow of time is necessarily aligned with the thermodynamic arrow, is correct. Schulman gives an explicit physical mechanism for this connection, based on the…
Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that…
The entropy production rate (EPR), a key measure of thermodynamic irreversibility in stochastic thermodynamics, is difficult to determine directly in experiments, motivating lower-bound-based estimation from observations. However, a…
There is a relation between the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes as expressed by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, and the entropy production in such processes. We explain on an elementary mathematical level the relations…
Time-reversal symmetry breaking and entropy production are universal features of nonequilibrium phenomena. Despite its importance in the physics of active and living systems, the entropy production of systems with many degrees of freedom…
In this paper we lay out an argument that generically the psychological arrow of time should align with the thermodynamic arrow of time where that arrow is well-defined. This argument applies to any physical system that can act as a memory,…
Microscopic physical laws are time-symmetric, hence, a priori there exists no preferential temporal direction. However, the second law of thermodynamics allows one to associate the "forward" temporal direction to a positive variation of the…
We investigate the thermodynamic arrow of time in a time-symmetrically recollapsing universe by calculating quantum mechanically the entropy production of a massive scalar field. It is found that even though the Hamiltonian has a…
In several previous papers we have argued for a global and non-entropic approach to the problem of the arrow of time, according to which the ''arrow'' is only a metaphorical way of expressing the geometrical time-asymmetry of the universe.…
Visibility algorithms are a family of methods to map time series into networks, with the aim of describing the structure of time series and their underlying dynamical properties in graph-theoretical terms. Here we explore some properties of…
The arrow of time dilemma: the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e. entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave…
Understanding the emergence of the thermodynamic arrow of time in microscopic systems is of fundamental importance, particularly given that unitary evolution preserves time-reversal symmetry. While projective measurements introduce temporal…