Related papers: Reflections of Sadi Carnot
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
The heat engine, a machine that extracts useful work from thermal sources, is one of the basic theoretical constructs and fundamental applications of classical thermodynamics. The classical description of a heat engine does not include…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
According to the laws of thermodynamics, no heat engine can beat the efficiency of a Carnot cycle. This efficiency traditionally comes with vanishing power output and practical designs, optimized for power, generally achieve far less.…
Macroscopic nonextensive thermodynamics is studied without recourse to microscopic statistical mechanics. It is shown that if entropy is nonextensive, the concept of physical temperature introduced through the generalized zeroth law of…
The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…
The first law of thermodynamics restates the law of conservation of energy. It partitions the change in energy of a system into two pieces, heat and work. While there is no ambiguity to define heat and work in classical thermodynamics,…
Thermodynamics, and in particular its first law, is of fundamental importance to Science, and therefore of great general interest to all physicists. The first law, although undoubtedly true, and believed by everyone to be true because of…
Information can improve heat engine performance, but the underlying principles are still not so clear. Here we introduce a Carnot information machine (CIE) and obtain a quantitative relationship between the engine performance and…
The radiation pressure exerted by incoherent light on diverse surfaces is examined. The thermodynamic rule, first given by Carnot in 1824, describes the limitation to the amount of free energy that can be obtained from a source of thermal…
Two recent topics on a formal thermodynamic analogy of intracellular diffusivity fluctuations observed experimentally in normal/anomalous diffusion are reported. Not only the analogs of the quantity of heat and work as well as the internal…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
Building on parallels between geometric quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, we explore an alternative basis for quantum thermodynamics that exploits the differential geometry of the underlying state space. We develop both…
How should one define thermodynamic quantities (internal energy, work, heat, etc.) for quantum systems coupled to their environments strongly? We examine three (classically equivalent) definitions of a quantum system's internal energy under…
Thermodynamics, the branch of physics concerned with the description of macroscopic bodies, heat exchange and the conversion of different forms of energy is based on four laws: the zeroth law, which states that bodies in thermal contact…
It is shown how information contained in the pairwise correlations (in general, partial) between atoms of a gas can be used to completely convert heat taken from a thermostat into mechanical work in a process of relaxation of the system to…
A theoretical thermodynamic cycle more efficient than an infinite set of Carnot engines is presented. This result is unexpected from the point of view of classical thermodynamics.
The separation of internal energy into heat and work in quantum thermodynamics is a controversial issue for a long time, and we revisit and solve this problem in this work. It is shown that the Hamiltonian plays dual roles for a quantum…
The Carnot heat engine sets an upper bound on the efficiency of a heat engine. As an ideal, reversible engine, a single cycle must be performed in infinite time, and so the Carnot engine has zero power. However, there is nothing in…
Isoenergetic thermalization amongst $n$ bodies is a well-known irreversible process, bringing the bodies to a common temperature $T_F$ and leading to a rise in the total entropy of the bodies. We express this change in entropy using the…