Related papers: Reflections of Sadi Carnot
Microcanonical Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics on one hand to closed finite and even small systems and on the other to the largest,self-gravitating ones. However, one has to reconsider the fundamental…
How to rigorously define thermodynamic quantities such as heat, work, and internal energy in open quantum systems driven far from equilibrium remains a significant open question in quantum thermodynamics. Heat is a quantity whose…
R. Clausius proved Carnot's theorem basing on postulate "Heat cannot, of itself, pass from a colder to a hotter body". Alexander Gukhman demonstrated that Carnot's theorem can be proved based on the postulate "Heat cannot, of itself, pass…
William Thomson proved Carnot's theorem basing on postulate: "It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the…
Several recent results on thermodynamics have been obtained using the tools of quantum information theory and resource theories. So far, the resource theories utilised to describe thermodynamics have assumed the existence of an infinite…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
Thomson's formulation of the second law - no work can be extracted from a system coupled to a bath through a cyclic process - is believed to be a fundamental principle of nature. For the equilibrium situation a simple proof is presented,…
Microcanonical thermodynamics allows the application of statistical mechanics both to finite and even small systems and also to the largest, self-gravitating ones. However, one must reconsider the fundamental principles of statistical…
A dynamical model of a highly efficient heat engine is proposed, where an applied temperature difference maintains the motion of particles around the circuit consisting of two asymmetric narrow channels, in one of which the current flows…
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot's celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines…
Dunkel and Hilbert, "Consistent thermostatistics forbids negative absolute temperatures," Nature Physics, {\bf 10}, 67 (2014), and Hilbert, H\"anggi, and Dunkel, "Thermodynamic laws in isolated systems," Phys. Rev. E {\bf 90}, 062116 (2014)…
This comprehensive treatise is written for the special occasion of the author's 70th birthday. It presents his lifelong endeavors and reflections with original reasoning and re-interpretations of the most critical and misleading issues in…
The status of heat and work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is quite confusing and non-unique at present with conflicting interpretations even after a long history of the first law in terms of exchange heat and work, and is far from…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
It is often claimed, that from a quantum system of d levels, and entropy S and heat bath of temperature T one can draw kT(ln d -S) amount of work. However, the usual arguments based on Szilard engine are not fully rigorous. Here we prove…
Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…
We study the maximum efficiency of a Carnot cycle heat engine based on a small system. It is revealed that due to the finiteness of the system, irreversibility may arise when the working substance contacts with a heat bath. As a result,…
As early as 1867, two years after the introduction of the concept of entropy by Clausius, Maxwell showed that the limitations imposed by the second law of thermodynamics depend on the information that one possesses about the state of a…
A unification of thermodynamics and information theory is proposed. It is argued that similarly to the randomness due to collisions in thermal systems, the quenched randomness that exists in data files in informatics systems contributes to…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…