Related papers: Thomson's formulation of the second law: an exact …
We study how Thomson's formulation of the second law: no work is extracted from an equilibrium ensemble by a cyclic process, emerges in the quantum situation through the averaging over fluctuations of work. The latter concept is carefully…
There are several formulations of the second law, and they may, in principle, have different domains of validity. Here a simple mathematical theorem is proven which serves as the most general basis for the second law, namely the Thomson…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
An apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics occurs when an atom coupled to a zero-temperature bath, being necessarily in an excited state, is used to extract work from the bath. Here the fallacy is that it takes work to couple…
In the classical limit no work is needed to couple a system to a bath with sufficiently weak coupling strength (or with arbitrarily finite coupling strength for a linear system) at the same temperature. In the quantum domain this may be…
We propose a new form of the Second Law inequality that defines a tight bound for extractable work from the non-equilibrium quantum state. In classical thermodynamics, the optimal work is given by the difference of free energy, what…
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…
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…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
In our recent letter [1] we discussed that thermodynamics is violated in quantum Brownian motion beyond the weak coupling limit. In his comment, Tasaki [2] derives an inequality for the relative entropy and claims, without making any…
The spin-boson model, often used in NMR and ESR physics, quantum optics and spintronics, is considered in a solvable limit to model a spin one-half particle interacting with a bosonic thermal bath. By applying external pulses to a…
The stationary state of a quantum particle strongly coupled to a quantum thermal bath is known to be non-gibbsian, due to entanglement with the bath. For harmonic potentials, where the system can be described by effective temperatures,…
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…
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 validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
Recently Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0006404) argued that the second law of thermodynamics may be violated in a quantum system as a "consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the…
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…
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…
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…
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…