Strasberg Philipp, Díaz María García, Riera-Campeny Andreu
Física Teòrica: Informació i Fenòmens Quàntics, Departament de Física, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain.
Phys Rev E. 2021 Aug;104(2):L022103. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.104.L022103.
We study entropy production in nanoscale devices, which are coupled to finite heat baths. This situation is of growing experimental relevance, but most theoretical approaches rely on a formulation of the second law valid only for infinite baths. We fix this problem by pointing out that Clausius' paper from 1865 already contains an adequate formulation of the second law for finite heat baths, which can be also rigorously derived from a microscopic quantum description. This Clausius inequality shows that nonequilibrium processes are less irreversible than previously thought. We use it to correctly extend Landauer's principle to finite baths and we demonstrate that any heat engine in contact with finite baths has a higher efficiency than previously thought. Importantly, our results are easy to study, requiring only the knowledge of the average bath energy.
我们研究与有限热库耦合的纳米尺度器件中的熵产生。这种情况在实验中的相关性日益增加，但大多数理论方法依赖于仅对无限热库有效的第二定律表述。我们通过指出1865年克劳修斯的论文已经包含了适用于有限热库的第二定律的适当表述来解决这个问题，该表述也可以从微观量子描述中严格推导出来。这个克劳修斯不等式表明非平衡过程的不可逆性比以前认为的要小。我们用它来正确地将兰道尔原理扩展到有限热库，并证明任何与有限热库接触的热机都具有比以前认为的更高的效率。重要的是，我们的结果易于研究，只需要知道热库的平均能量。
