Related papers: Irreversibility as divergence from equilibrium
We establish that entropy production, which is crucial to the characterization of thermodynamic irreversibility, is obtained through a variational principle involving the Kulback-Leibler divergence. A simple application of this…
The characterization of irreversibility in general quantum processes is an open problem of increasing techno- logical relevance. Yet, the tools currently available to this aim are mostly limited to the assessment of dynamics induced by…
Nonequilibrium steady-state currents, unlike their equilibrium counterparts, continuously dissipate energy into their physical surroundings leading to entropy production and time-reversal symmetry breaking. This letter discusses these…
Data from experiments and theoretical arguments are the two pillars sustaining the job of modelling physical systems through inference. In order to solve the inference problem, the data should satisfy certain conditions that depend also…
Current research in statistical mechanics mostly concerns the investigation of out-of-equilibrium, irreversible processes, which are ubiquitous in nature and still far from being theoretically understood. Even the precise characterization…
The relation between the thermodynamic entropy production and non-Markovian evolutions is matter of current research. Here, we study the behavior of the stochastic entropy production in open quantum systems undergoing unital non-Markovian…
Entropy is one of the key thermodynamic variables reflecting changes in the state of matter. Unlike other thermodynamic variables, it is well-defined also for nonequilibrium steady states through its relation to information. Applying this…
Closely related to the laws of thermodynamics, the detection and quantification of disequilibria are crucial in unraveling the complexities of nature, particularly those beneath observable layers. Theoretical developments in nonequilibrium…
The act of measuring a system has profound consequences of dynamical and thermodynamic nature. In particular, the degree of irreversibility ensuing from a non-equilibrium process is strongly affected by measurements aimed at acquiring…
We assume that markovian dynamics on a finite graph enjoys a gauge symmetry under local scalings of the probability density, derive the transformation law for the transition rates and interpret the thermodynamic force as a gauge potential.…
A nonequilibrium system is characterized by a set of thermodynamic forces and fluxes which give rise to entropy production (EP). We show that these forces and fluxes have an information-geometric structure, which allows us to decompose EP…
The dynamics of irreversible relaxation of non-equilibrium macroscopic systems is discussed. Arguments are developed showing that the general process is supported by two independent successive mechanisms. One is mixing and it follows pure…
The entropy production rate is a key quantity in irreversible thermodynamics. In this work, we concentrate on the realization of entropy production rate in chemical reaction systems in terms of the experimentally measurable reaction rate.…
Non-reciprocal interactions are present in many systems out of equilibrium. The rate of entropy production is a measure that quantifies the time irreversibility of a system, and thus how far it is from equilibrium. In this work, we…
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this…
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…
To describe the nonequilibrium states of a system we introduce a new thermodynamic parameter - the lifetime of a system. The statistical distributions which can be obtained out of the mesoscopic description characterizing the behaviour of a…
Thermodynamic irreversibility is well characterized by the entropy production arising from non-equilibrium quantum processes. We show that the entropy production of a quantum system undergoing open-system dynamics can be formally split into…
The inference of thermodynamic quantities from the description of an only partially accessible physical system is a central challenge in stochastic thermodynamics. A common approach is coarse-graining, which maps the dynamics of such a…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…