Related papers: Second law of thermodynamics in closed quantum man…
We treat a quantum mechanical system with certain general properties which are expected to be common in macroscopic quantum systems. Starting from a PURE initial state (which may not describe an equilibrium) in which energy is mildly…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
This article is a short version of a longer article to appear in Physics Reports (cond-mat/9708200). The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of…
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer…
To reconstruct thermodynamics based on the microscopic laws is one of the most important unfulfilled goals of statistical physics. Here, we show that the first law and the second law for adiabatic processes are derived from an assumption…
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…
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…
Quantum thermodynamics aims at investigating both the emergence and the limits of the laws of thermodynamics from a quantum mechanical microscopic approach. In this scenario, thermodynamic processes with no heat exchange, namely, adiabatic…
In quantum systems which satisfy the hypothesis of equal weights for eigenstates [4], the maximum work principle (for extremely slow and relatively fast operation) is derived by using quantum dynamics alone. This may be a crucial step in…
Quantum dynamics controlled by a time-dependent coupling constant are studied. It is proven that an energy eigenstate expectation value of work done by the system in a quench process cannot exceed the work in the corresponding quasi-static…
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…
Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
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…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
We consider the Non-Equilibrium Steady State induced by two infinite quantum thermal reservoirs at different temperatures and derive an inequality giving the upper bound of the work extracted by cyclic operations. This upper bound tends to…
The evolution of a driven quantum system is said to be adiabatic whenever the state of the system stays close to an instantaneous eigenstate of its time-dependent Hamiltonian. The celebrated quantum adiabatic theorem ensures that such pure…