Related papers: Why the persistent power can be observed in mesosc…
Time-asymmetric behavior as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics is observed in {\it individual macroscopic} systems. It can be understood as arising naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws when account is taken of a) the…
The first law of thermodynamics imposes not just a constraint on the energy-content of systems in extreme quantum regimes, but also symmetry-constraints related to the thermodynamic processing of quantum coherence. We show that this…
Evidence implies that basic laws of thermodynamics must be tested by experiments. In this paper, an experiment is designed to measure the entropy of a system with at least one known (measurable) equation of state, especially the gas…
Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging…
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,…
The Clausius inequality, one of the classical formulations of the second law, was recently found to be violated in the quantum regime. Here this result is formulated in the context of a mesoscopic or nanoscale linear RLC circuit interacting…
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…
We start by reviewing some interesting results in mesoscopic physics illustrating nontrivial insights on Quantum Mechanics. We then review the general principles of dephasing (sometimes called "decoherence") of Quantum-Mechanical…
A mesoscopic system of cylindrical geometry made of a metal or a semiconductor is shown to exhibit features of a quantum coherent state. It is shown that magnetostatic interaction can play an important role in mesoscopic systems leading to…
The analysis conducted in this work indicates that interactions of a CP-violating (and CPT-preserving) quantum system with a thermodynamic environment can produce the impression of a CPT violation in the system. This conclusion is…
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…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
Claims of exceptions to the second law of thermodynamics are generally met with extreme skepticism that is quite reasonable given the great confidence placed in the second law. But what specifically is the basis for that confidence? The…
We investigate the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, in the cosmological scenario where dark energy interacts with both dark matter and radiation. Calculating separately the entropy variation for each fluid component…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
Quantum mechanics has many counter-intuitive consequences which contradict our intuition which is based on classical physics. Here we discuss a special aspect of quantum mechanics, namely the possibility of entanglement between two or more…
It is demonstrated that the second quantization which is the basis of quantum electrodynamics is introduced without sufficient grounds and even logically inconsistently although it yields extremely accurate predictions that are in excellent…
The second law of thermodynamics - the usual statement of the arrow of time - has been called the most fundamental law of physics. It is thus difficult to conceive that a single dynamical system could contain subsystems, in significant…