What is Quantum Thermodynamics?

What is the physical significance of entropy? What is the physical origin of irreversibility? Do entropy and irreversibility exist only for complex and macroscopic systems? For everyday laboratory physics, the mathematical formalism of Statistical Mechanics (canonical and grand-canonical, Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac distributions) allows a successful description of the thermodynamic equilibrium properties of matter, including entropy values. However, as already recognized by Schrödinger in 1936, Statistical Mechanics is impaired by conceptual ambiguities and logical inconsistencies, both in its explanation of the meaning of entropy and in its implications on the concept of state of a system. An alternative theory has been developed by Gyftopoulos, Hatsopoulos and the present author to eliminate these stumbling conceptual blocks while maintaining the mathematical formalism of ordinary quantum theory, so successful in applications. To resolve both the problem of the meaning of entropy and that of the origin of irreversibility, we have built entropy and irreversibility into the laws of microscopic physics. The result is a theory that has all the necessary features to combine Mechanics and Thermodynamics uniting all the successful results of both theories, eliminating the logical inconsistencies of Statistical Mechanics and the paradoxes on irreversibility, and providing an entirely new perspective on the microscopic origin of irreversibility, nonlinearity (therefore including chaotic behavior) and maximal-entropy-generation non-equilibrium dynamics. In this long introductory paper we discuss the background and formalism of Quantum Thermodynamics including its nonlinear equation of motion and the main general results regarding the nonequilibrium irreversible dynamics it entails. Our objective is to discuss and motivate the form of the generator of a nonlinear quantum dynamical group “designed” so as to accomplish a unification of quantum mechanics (QM) and thermodynamics, the nonrelativistic theory that we call Quantum Thermodynamics (QT). Its conceptual foundations differ from those of (von Neumann) quantum statistical mechanics (QSM) and (Jaynes) quantum information theory (QIT), but for thermody-