Related papers: Microstates : Do the outliers worth
According to statistical mechanics, micro-states of an isolated physical system (say, a gas in a box) at time $t_0$ in a given macro-state of less-than-maximal entropy typically evolve in such a way that the entropy at time $t$ increases…
Interacting particle systems with many degrees of freedom may undergo phase transitions to sustain atypical fluctuations of dynamical observables such as the current or the activity. This leads in some cases to symmetry-broken space-time…
The second law of thermodynamics is asymmetric with respect to time as it says that the entropy of the universe must have been lower in the past and will be higher in the future. How this time-asymmetric law arises from the time-symmetric…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
The object of this paper is twofold. From one side we study the dichotomy, in terms of the Extremal Index of the possible Extreme Value Laws, when the rare events are centred around periodic or non periodic points. Then we build a general…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
Noise plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of physical and biological dynamical systems. It can arise from an external forcing or due to random dynamics internal to the system. It is well established that even weak noise can result in…
The second law of thermodynamics points to the existence of an `arrow of time', along which entropy only increases. This arises despite the time-reversal symmetry (TRS) of the microscopic laws of nature. Within quantum theory, TRS underpins…
An interesting question to explore in physics classes is whether gravity violates the second law of thermodynamics. Standard physics textbooks provide little to no discussion of the relationship between entropy and gravity, and the same is…
The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of…
Despite the importance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is not absolute. Statistical mechanics implies that, given sufficient time, systems near equilibrium will spontaneously fluctuate into lower-entropy states, locally reversing…
Several results of black holes thermodynamics can be considered as firmly founded and formulated in a very general manner. From this starting point we analyse in which way these results may give us the opportunity to gain a better…
We investigate extreme value theory for physical systems with a global conservation law which describe renewal processes, mass transport models and long-range interacting spin models. As shown previously, a special feature is that the…
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…
Statistical physics and dynamical systems theory are key tools to study high-impact geophysical events such as temperature extremes, cyclones, thunderstorms, geomagnetic storms and many more. Despite the intrinsic differences between these…
Particle motion at the micro-scale is an incessant tug-of-war between thermal fluctuations and applied forces on one side, and the strong resistance exerted by fluid viscosity on the other. Friction is so strong that completely neglecting…
At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…
A general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics is presented for open systems exchanging energy and particles with multiple reservoirs. By introducing a partition in terms of "macrostates" (e.g. sets of "microstates"), the consequence on…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…
Why can the world resist the law of entropy increase and produce self-organizing structure? Does the entropy of an isolated system always only increase and never decrease? Can be thermodymamic degradation and self-organizing evolution…