Related papers: Reflections of Sadi Carnot
Accurately describing work extraction from a quantum system is a central objective for the extension of thermodynamics to individual quantum systems. The concepts of work and heat are surprisingly subtle when generalizations are made to…
We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…
The heat theorem (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics or the existence of entropy) is a manifestation of a general property of hamiltonian mechanics and of the ergodic Hypothesis. In nonequilibrium thermodynamics of stationary states the…
A heat engine operating on the basis of the Carnot cycle is considered, where the mechanical work performed is dissipated within the engine at the temperature of the warmer isotherm and the resulting heat is added to the engine together…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
A new thermodynamic inequality is derived which leads to the maximum work that can be extracted from multi-heat baths with the assistance of discrete quantum feedback control. The maximum work is determined by the free-energy difference and…
Materials that are constantly driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium, such as active and living systems, typically violate the Einstein relation. This may arise from active contributions to particle fluctuations which are unrelated to the…
The Heat theorem reveals the second law of equilibrium Thermodynamics (i.e.existence of Entropy) as a manifestation of a general property of Hamiltonian Mechanics and of the Ergodic Hypothesis, valid for 1 as well as $10^{23}$ degrees of…
We design a heat engine with multi-heat-reservoir, ancillary system and quantum memory. We then derive an inequality related with the second law of thermodynamics, and give a new limitation about the work gain from the engine by analyzing…
Achieving the Carnot efficiency at finite power is a challenging problem in heat engines due to the trade-off relation between efficiency and power that holds for general heat engines. It is pointed out that the Carnot efficiency at finite…
We revisit the relationship between the Nernst theorem and the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law. We propose that the exchange of entropy uniformly vanishes as the temperature goes to zero. The analysis of this assumption shows that…
This paper is a natural continuation of a previous one by the author, which was concerned with the foundations of statistical thermodynamics far from equilibrium. One of the problems left open in that paper was the correct definition of…
The classical thermodynamic laws fail to capture the behavior of systems with energy Hamiltonian which is an explicit function of the temperature. Such Hamiltonian arises, for example, in modeling information processing systems, like…
The relationships between reversible Carnot cycles, the absence of perpetual motion machines and the existence of a non-decreasing, globally unique entropy function forms the starting point of many textbook presentations of the foundations…
It is possible to extract work from a quantum-mechanical system whose dynamics is governed by a time-dependent cyclic Hamiltonian. An energy bath is required to operate such a quantum engine in place of the heat bath used to run a…
Originally, the Carnot cycle is a theoretical thermodynamic cycle that provides an upper limit on the efficiency that any classical thermodynamic engine can achieve during the conversion of heat into work, or conversely, the efficiency of a…
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
Thermodynamics and information have intricate inter-relations. The justification of the fact that information is physical, is done by inter-linking information and thermodynamics - through Landauer's principle. This modern approach towards…
The association of information with entropy has been argued on plausibility arguments involving the operation of imaginary engines and beings, and it is not a universal theorem. In this paper, a theorem by Charles Bennett on reversible…