Fernando G. S. L. Brandao, Michał\ Horodecki, Nelly Huei Ying Ng, Jonathan Oppenheim, Stephanie Wehner
The second law of thermodynamics tells us which state transformations are so statistically unlikely that they are effectively forbidden. Its original formulation, due to Clausius, states that "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time." The second law applies to systems composed of many particles, however, we are seeing that one can make sense of thermodynamics in the regime where we only have a small number of particles interacting with a heat bath, or when we have highly correlated systems and wish to make non-statistical statements about them. Is there a second law of thermodynamics in this regime? Here, we find that for processes which are cyclic or very close to cyclic, the second law for microscopic or highly correlated systems takes on a very different form than it does at the macroscopic scale, imposing not just one constraint on what state transformations are possible, but an entire family of constraints. In particular, we find that the Renyi relative entropy distances to the equilibrium state can never increase. We further find that there are three regimes which govern which family of second laws govern state transitions, depending on how cyclic the process is. In one regime one can cause an apparent violation of the usual second law, through a process of embezzling work from a large system which remains arbitrarily close to its original state.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.5278
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