Physical Review Letters publishes the article "Irreversible Work and Inner Friction in Quantum Thermodynamic Processes" on the work done by Fernando Galve and Roberta Zambrini, researchers from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, IFISC (CSIC-UIB) in this area.
The study of thermodynamics in recent centuries has led to significant advances in everyday human life, such as combustion engines and refrigerators, without which we would imagine now hardly the world.
In the article the autors discuss the thermodynamics of closed quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by a change in a control parameter and undergoing a unitary process. They compare the work actually done on the system with the one that would be performed along ideal adiabatic and isothermal transformations. The comparison with the latter leads to the introduction of irreversible work, while that with the former leads to the introduction of inner friction. IFISC researchers show that these two quantities can be treated on an equal footing, as both can be linked with the heat exchanged in thermalization processes and both can be expressed as relative entropies. Furthermore, they show that a specific fluctuation relation for the entropy production associated with the inner friction exists, which allows the inner friction to be written in terms of its cumulants.
Bibliographic reference:
F. Plastina, A. Alecce, T.J.G. Apollaro, G. Falcone, G. Francica, F. Galve, N. Lo Gullo, and R. Zambrini, Physical Review Letters 113, 260601 (2014).
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.260601