相关论文: Precision is not limited by the second law of ther…

Fluctuation theorems and the second law of thermodynamics are powerful relations constraining the behavior of out-of-equilibrium systems. While there exist generalizations of these relations to feedback controlled quantum systems, their…

All clocks, in some form or another, use the evolution of nature towards higher entropy states to quantify the passage of time. Due to the statistical nature of the second law and corresponding entropy flows, fluctuations fundamentally…

Time remains one of the least well understood concepts in physics, most notably in quantum mechanics. A central goal is to find the fundamental limits of measuring time. One of the main obstacles is the fact that time is not an observable…

Overdamped stochastic systems maintained far from equilibrium can display sustained oscillations with fluctuations that decrease with the system size. The correlation time of such noisy limit cycles expressed in units of the cycle period is…

We consider a periodic quantum clock based on cooperative resonance fluorescence at zero temperature. In the quantum case, this system has an exact steady state and the limit cycle appears in conditional quantum dynamics under homodyne…

All clocks, classical or quantum, are open non equilibrium irreversible systems subject to the constraints of thermodynamics. Using examples I show that these constraints necessarily limit the performance of clocks and that good clocks…

The thermodynamic and kinetic uncertainty relations indicate trade-offs between the relative fluctuation of observables and thermodynamic quantities such as dissipation and dynamical activity. Although these relations have been well studied…

Fluctuations strongly affect the dynamics and functionality of nanoscale thermal machines. Recent developments in stochastic thermodynamics have shown that fluctuations in many far-from-equilibrium systems are constrained by the rate of…

Many theoretical expressions of dissipation along non-equilibrium processes have been proposed. However, they have not been fully verified by experiments. Especially for systems strongly interacting with environments the connection between…

The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…

According to thermodynamics, the inevitable increase of entropy allows the past to be distinguished from the future. From this perspective, any clock must incorporate an irreversible process that allows this flow of entropy to be tracked.…

We use rigorous non-equilibrium thermodynamic arguments to prove (i) the residual entropy of any system is bounded below by the experimentally (calorimetrically) determined absolute temperature entropy, which itself is bounded below by the…

Deriving the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic picture is a central quest of statistical mechanics. This tutorial focuses on the derivation of the first and second law for closed and open quantum systems far from equilibrium, where…

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,…

Materials that are constantly driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium, such as active and living systems, typically violate the Einstein relation. This may arise from active contributions to particle fluctuations which are unrelated to the…

The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…

The thermodynamic uncertainty relation quantifies a trade-off between the relative fluctuations of trajectory currents and the thermodynamic cost, indicating that the current precision is fundamentally constrained by entropy production. In…

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…

The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…

Thermal machines are physical systems designed to convert thermal energy into practical work through cyclic state transformations. A key component in such a machine is a clock-equipped control element that dictates which interaction…