Related papers: Second law versus variation principles

Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…

Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of a general second-order stochastic system is investigated. We prove that at steady state, under inversion of velocities, the condition of time-reversibility over the phase space is equivalent to the…

The development of stochastic thermodynamics during the last decades prompted the discovery of novel nonequilibrium relations refining our understanding of the second law in small fluctuating systems and its connection with information…

The key element of the approach to the theory of necessary conditions in optimal control discussed in the paper is reduction of the original constrained problem to unconstrained minimization with subsequent application of a suitable…

We investigate the overdamped stochastic dynamics of a particle in an asymptotically flat external potential field, in contact with a thermal bath. For an infinite system size, the particles may escape the force field and diffuse freely at…

We investigate the unified first law and the generalized second law in a modified holographic dark energy model. The thermodynamical analysis on the apparent horizon can work and the corresponding entropy formula is extracted from the…

We proved when random-variable fluctuations obey the central limit theorem the equality of the uncertainty relation corresponds to the thermodynamic equilibrium state. The inequality corresponds to the thermodynamic non-equilibrium state.…

At the core of optimal control theory is the Pontryagin maximum principle - the celebrated first order necessary optimality condition - whose solutions are called extremals and which are obtained through a function called Hamiltonian, akin…

In this paper we study a class of physical systems that combine a finite number of mechanical and thermodynamic observables. We call them finite dimensional thermo-mechanical systems. We introduce these systems by means of simple examples.…

We revisit the concavity property of the thermodynamic entropy in order to formulate a general proof of the minimum energy principle as well as of other equivalent extremum principles that are valid for thermodynamic potentials and…

We assume that markovian dynamics on a finite graph enjoys a gauge symmetry under local scalings of the probability density, derive the transformation law for the transition rates and interpret the thermodynamic force as a gauge potential.…

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…

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 generalize stochastic thermodynamics to include information reservoirs. Such information reservoirs, which can be modeled as a sequence of bits, modify the second law. For example, work extraction from a system in contact with a single…

Macroscopic cyclic heat engines have been a major motivation for the emergence of thermodynamics. In the last decade, cyclic heat engines that have large fluctuations and operate at finite time were studied within the more modern framework…

The postulational basis of classical thermodynamics has been expanded to incorporate equilibrium fluctuations. The main additional elements of the proposed thermodynamic theory are the concept of quasi-equilibrium states, a definition of…

When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…

In this paper we combine two main topics in mechanics and optimal control theory: contact Hamiltonian systems and Pontryagin Maximum Principle. As an important result, among others, we develop a contact Pontryagin Maximum Principle that…

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…

We derive an upper bound for the expected gain of informed traders in the Glosten-Milgrom model with finite horizon, fully analogous to a generalized second law of thermodynamics. This result extends that obtained by Touzo et al. a couple…