Related papers: Thermal relaxation asymmetry persists under inerti…
It was predicted and recently experimentally confirmed that systems with microscopically reversible dynamics in locally quadratic potentials warm up faster than they cool down. This thermal relaxation asymmetry challenged the…
We uncover an unforeseen asymmetry in relaxation -- for a pair of thermodynamically equidistant temperature quenches, one from a lower and the other from a higher temperature, the relaxation at the ambient temperature is faster in case of…
In a recent Letter [A. Lapolla and A. Godec, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 110602 (2020)], thermal relaxation was observed to occur faster from cold to hot (heating) than from hot to cold (cooling). Here we show that overdamped diffusion in…
An asymmetry in thermal relaxation toward equilibrium has been uncovered for Langevin systems near stable minima [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 110602 (2020)]. It has been shown that, given the same degree of nonequilibrium of the initial…
An intriguing phenomenon in non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics is the asymmetry of thermal processes. Relaxation to thermal equilibrium is the most important dissipative process, being a key concept for the design of heat engines and…
A recent work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 110602] showed that among a pair of \textit{thermodynamically} equidistant quenches from a colder and a hotter initial state at a fixed ambient temperature, the relaxation from the colder initial state…
According to conventional wisdom, a system placed in an environment with a different temperature tends to relax to the temperature of the latter, mediated by the flows of heat and/or matter that are set solely by the temperature difference.…
The limit of small entropy production is reached in relaxing systems long after preparation, and in stationary driven systems in the limit of small driving power. Surprisingly, for extended systems this limit is not in general the…
The features for the unsteady process of thermal equilibration ("the fast motions") in a one-dimensional harmonic crystal lying in a viscous environment (e.g., a gas) are under investigation. It is assumed that initially the displacements…
Most of our intuition about the behavior of physical systems is shaped by observations at or near thermal equilibrium. However, even a thermal quench can lead to states far from thermal equilibrium, where counterintuitive, anomalous effects…
We show that in any relativistic system, entanglement entropy obeys a speed limit set by the entanglement in thermal equilibrium. The bound is derived from inequalities on relative entropy with respect to a thermal reference state. Thus the…
We consider thermal relaxation process of a quantum system attached to a single or multiple reservoirs. Quantifying the degree of irreversibility by entropy production, we prove that the irreversibility of the thermal relaxation is…
One of the key objectives in investigating small stochastic systems is the development of micrometer-sized engines and the understanding of their thermodynamics. However, the primary mathematical tool used for this purpose, the overdamped…
We numerically simulate a thermalization process in an energy landscape with hierarchically organized metastable states. The initial configuration is chosen to have a large energy excess, relative to the thermal equilibrium value at the…
We study properties of isolated integrable quantum systems after a sudden quench starting from thermal states. We show that, even if the system is initially in thermal equilibrium at finite temperature, the diagonal entropy after a quench…
The linear response to temperature changes is derived for systems with overdamped stochastic dynamics. Holding both in transient and steady state conditions, the results allow to compute nonequilibrium thermal susceptibilities from…
Thermalization in highly excited quantum many-body system does not necessarily mean a complete memory loss of the way the system was formed. This effect may pave a way for a quantum computing, with a large number of qubits $n\simeq…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…
It is commonly assumed that a large system, weakly coupled to a thermal environment through its boundaries, relaxes quasistatically towards the new equilibrium even when the temperature of the environment changes abruptly. Here we show how…
It is argued that a typical many body energy eigenstate has a well defined thermodynamic entropy and that individual eigenstates possess thermodynamic characteristics analogous to those of generic isolated systems. We examine large systems…