Related papers: A quantum violation of the second law?
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…
A recently proposed quantum mechanical criterion `concavity of energy' for the second law of thermodynamics is studied also for classical particle systems confined in a bounded region by a potential with a time-dependent coupling constant.…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
The amount of work that is needed to change the state of a system in contact with a heat bath between specified initial and final nonequilibrium states is at least equal to the corresponding equilibrium free energy difference plus (resp.…
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…
Events in mesoscopic systems often take place at first-passage times, as is for instance the case for a colloidal particle that escapes a metastable state. An interesting question is how much work an external agent has done on a particle…
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…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…
The possibility of a controlled manipulation with molecules at the nanoscale allows us to gain net work from thermal energy, although this seems to be in contradiction to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Any manipulation, however, causes…
Small quantum systems non-weakly coupled to a bath become in the quantum regime surrounded by a cloud of photons or phonons, which modifies their thermodynamic behavior. Exactly solvable examples are the Brownian motion of a quantum…
We develop a general theory describing the thermodynamical behavior of open quantum systems coupled to thermal baths beyond perturbation theory. Our approach is based on the exact time-local quantum master equation for the reduced open…
We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive…
The minimal work principle states that work done on a thermally isolated equilibrium system is minimal for adiabatically slow (reversible) realization of a given process. This principle, one of the formulations of the second law, is studied…
We show that the case of two oscillators in a common heat bath cannot be reduced to an effective one body problem. In addition, there is an interaction between the oscillators, even at zero temperature, due to the fluctuations caused in…
The rate of temperature decrease of a cooled quantum bath is studied as its temperature is reduced to the absolute zero. The III-law of thermodynamics is then quantified dynamically by evaluating the characteristic exponent {\zeta} of the…
Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…
The example provided in the comment [arXiv:0803.2241] concerns a situation where the system is initially at negative temperature. It is known that in such cases the Law of Entropy Decrease holds. Nevertheless, this does not challenge the…
In the present work we show that the second law of thermodynamics does not generally hold if the matter and gravitational fields are nonminimally coupled. We demonstrate this result by explicitly computing the evolution of the entropy of…