相关论文: The second law of thermodynamics at the microscopi…
The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…
Despite its enormous empirical success, the formalism of quantum theory still raises fundamental questions: why is nature described in terms of complex Hilbert spaces, and what modifications of it could we reasonably expect to find in some…
It is argued the the idea of a single temperature-like variable, introduced in [1], which enters a generalized second law for Markovian open system in non-equilibrium environment is not sufficient for a consistent and useful thermodynamic…
A pure quantum state can fully describe thermal equilibrium as long as one focuses on local observables. Thermodynamic entropy can also be recovered as the entanglement entropy of small subsystems. When the size of the subsystem increases,…
It is argued that a typical many body energy eigenstate has a well defined thermodynamic entropy and that individual eigenstates possess thermodynamic characteristics analogous to those of generic isolated systems. We examine large systems…
We extend stochastic thermodynamics by relaxing the two assumptions that the Markovian dynamics must be linear and that the equilibrium distribution must be a Boltzmann distribution. We show that if we require the second law to hold when…
In our derivation of the second law of thermodynamics from the relation of adiabatic accessibility of equilibrium states we stressed the importance of being able to scale a system's size without changing its intrinsic properties. This…
When a thermodynamic system is released from any constraint, after some time its evolution will render it into an equilibrium state. Although the description of this relaxation to thermodynamic equilibrium has been attempted through both…
We show that the system entropy change for the transitions between non-equilibrium steady states arbitrarily far from equilibrium for any constituting process is given by the relative entropy of the distributions of these steady states.…
The Brownian motion of a quantum particle in a harmonic confining potential and coupled to a harmonic quantum thermal bath is exactly solvable. It is shown that at low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an…
Macroscopic thermodynamics of equilibrium is constructed for systems obeying power-law canonical distributions. With this, the connection between macroscopic thermodynamics and microscopic statistical thermodynamics is generalized. This is…
We extend on ideas from standard thermodynamics to show that temperature can be assigned to a general nonequilibrium quantum system. By choosing a physically motivated complete set of observables and expanding the system state thereupon,…
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
Statistical formulations of thermodynamic entropy, such as those by Boltzmann and Gibbs, were originally developed for classical systems and are well understood in that context. However, the foundational aspects of quantum statistical…
In classical phenomenological thermodynamics the first and second laws can be regarded as independent statements. Statistical mechanics provides a microscopic substratum that explains thermodynamics in probabilistic terms via a microstate…
A simplified thermodynamic approach of the incompressible 2D Euler equation is considered based on the conservation of energy, circulation and microscopic enstrophy. Statistical equilibrium states are obtained by maximizing the…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
We present a statistical mechanics description to study the ground state of quantum systems. In this approach, averages for the complete system are calculated over the non-interacting energy levels. Taking different interaction parameter,…
We study two small quantum systems coupled to the same reservoir which is in thermal equilibrium. By studying the particle density and the energy density in the two systems before and after they contact each other, we find that the two…