Related papers: Microscopic analysis of Clausius-Duhem processes
Several results of black holes thermodynamics can be considered as firmly founded and formulated in a very general manner. From this starting point we analyse in which way these results may give us the opportunity to gain a better…
We consider a situation where an $N$-level system (NLS) is coupled to a heat bath without being necessarily thermalized. For this situation we derive general Jarzinski-type equations and conclude that heat and entropy is flowing from the…
Bridging equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical physics attracts sustained interest. Hallmarks of nonequilibrium systems include a breakdown of detailed balance, and an absence of a priori potential function corresponding to the…
A quantum mechanical explanation of the relaxation to equilibrium is shown for macroscopic systems for nonintegrable cases and numerically verified. The macroscopic system is initially in an equilibrium state, subsequently externally…
Entanglement within a given device provides a potential resource for quantum information processing. Entanglement between system and environment leads to decoherence (thus suppressing non-classical features within the system) but also opens…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics provides powerful tools to understand physics at the macroscale. Yet, the question remains how this can be justified based on a microscopic quantum description. Here, we extend the ideas of pure state…
Microcanonical analysis is a powerful method for studying phase transitions of finite-size systems. This method has been used so far only for studying phase transitions of equilibrium systems, which can be described by microcanonical…
Thermodynamics can be formulated in either of two approaches, the phenomenological approach, which refers to the macroscopic properties of systems, and the statistical approach, which describes systems in terms of their microscopic…
Various notions of fluctuations exist depending on the way one chooses to measure them. We discuss two extreme cases (continuous measurement versus long inter-measurement times) and we see their relation with entropy production and with…
We discuss entropy production in nonequilibrium steady states by focusing on paths obtained by sampling at regular (small) intervals, instead of sampling on each change of the system's state. This allows us to study directly entropy…
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…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics provides a robust framework for characterizing phase transitions in systems whose microsopic dynamics are time-reversible. Efforts to develop and validate theoretical frameworks for time-irreversible,…
It is known that the equilibrium properties of open classical systems that are strongly coupled to a heat bath are described by a set of thermodynamic potentials related to the system's Hamiltonian of mean force. By adapting this framework…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics can provide strong advantages when compared to more standard equilibrium situations. Here, we present a general framework to study its application to concrete problems, which is valid also beyond the…
The most complicated phenomena of equilibrium statistics, phase separations and transitions of various order and critical phenomena, can clearly and sharply be seen even for small systems in the topology of the curvature of the…
Fluctuating entropy production is studied for a set of linearly coupled complex fields. The general result is applied to non-equilibrium fluctuating hydrodynamic equations for coarse-grained fields (density, temperature and velocity), in…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
We investigate thermodynamics of general nonequilibrium processes stopped at stochastic times. We propose a systematic strategy for constructing fluctuation-theorem-like martingales for each thermodynamic functional, yielding a family of…
Relating thermodynamic and kinetic properties is a conceptual challenge with many practical benefits. Here, based on first principles, we derive a rigorous inequality relating the entropy and the dynamic propagator of particle…
We study the nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of a finite classical system subjected to nongradient forces $\xi$ and maintained at fixed kinetic energy (Hoover-Evans isokinetic thermostat). We assume that the microscopic dynamics is…