Related papers: How the Hahn-Banach Theorem Sheds Bright Light on …
In a companion article it was shown in a certain precise sense that, for any thermodynamical theory that respects the Kelvin-Planck Second Law, the Hahn-Banach Theorem immediately ensures the existence of a pair of continuous functions of…
The Kelvin-Planck statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a stricture on the nature of heat receipt by any body suffering a cyclic process. It makes no mention of temperature or of entropy. Beginning with a Kelvin-Planck statement…
An important consequence of the Hahn-Banach Theorem says that on any locally convex Hausdorff topological space $X$, there are sufficiently many continuous linear functionals to separate points of $X$. In the paper, we establish a `local'…
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…
As a cornerstone of functional analysis, Hahn Banach theorem constitutes an indispensable tool of modern analysis where its impact extends beyond the frontiers of linear functional analysis into several other domains of mathematics,…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
$H$-theorem states that the entropy production is nonnegative and, therefore, the entropy of a closed system should monotonically change in time. In information processing, the entropy production is positive for random transformation of…
The Hahn-Banach theorem is an extension theorem for linear functionals which preserves certain properties. Specifically, if a linear functional is defined on a subspace of a real vector space which is dominated by a sublinear functional on…
A general formulation of the equilibrium state of a many-electron system in terms of a (mixed-state, ensemble) density matrix operator in the Fock space, based on the maximum entropy principle, is introduced. Various characteristic…
The Brownian motion of a quantum particle in a harmonic confining potential and coupled to a harmonic quantum thermal bath is exactly solvable. It is shown that at low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an…
We prove Hohenberg-Kohn theorems for several models of quantum mechanics. First, we show that the pair correlation function of any ground state contains the information of the interactions and of the external potentials. Then, in the…
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…
All physical theories should obey the second law of thermodynamics. However, existing proposals to describe the dynamics of hybrid classical-quantum systems either violate the second law or lack a proof of its existence. Here we rectify…
People are well aware that, inherently, certain small-scale nonchaotic particle movements are not governed by thermodynamics. Usually, such phenomena are studied by kinetic theory and their energy properties are considered "trivial". In…
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…
Recent research on the fundamentals of statistical mechanics has led to an interesting discovery [1-3]: With locally nonchaotic barriers, as Boltzmann's H-theorem is inapplicable, there exist nontrivial non-thermodynamic systems that can…
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…
In this paper, the foundations of classical phenomenological thermodynamics are being thoroughly revisited. A new rigorous basis for thermodynamics is laid out in the main text and presented in full detail in the appendix. All relevant…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
We present an analysis of the foundations of the well known Clausius inequality. It is shown that, strictly speaking, the inequality is not a logical consequence of the Kelvin-Planck formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Some…