Thomson's formulation of the second law: an exact theorem and limits of its validity

Details Thomson's formulation of the second law: an exact theorem and limits of its validity Thomson's formulation of the second law: an exact theorem and limits of its validity

2002-08-28

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0208563v1

Physics

Condensed Matter

Statistical Mechanics

6 pages Latex, uses aip-proceedings style files. Proceedings `Quantum Limits to the Second Law', San Diego, July 2002

Scientific paper

10.1063/1.1523778

Thomson's formulation of the second law - no work can be extracted from a system coupled to a bath through a cyclic process - is believed to be a fundamental principle of nature. For the equilibrium situation a simple proof is presented, valid for macroscopic sources of work. Thomson's formulation gets limited when the source of work is mesoscopic, i.e. when its number of degrees of freedom is large but finite. Here work-extraction from a single equilibrium thermal bath is possible when its temperature is large enough. This result is illustrated by means of exactly solvable models. Finally we consider the Clausius principle: heat goes from high to low temperature. A theorem and some simple consequences for this statement are pointed out.

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