A normal full-contact graphene/substrate interface has been reported to have a thermal conductance in the order of 10(8) Wm(-2)K(-1). The reported work used a sandwiched structure to probe the interface energy coupling, and the phonon behavior in graphene was significantly altered in an undesirable way. Here, we report an intriguing study of energy coupling across unconstrained graphene/substra...

It is broadly accepted that so-called 'thermal' gas is the product of thermal cracking, 'primary' thermal gas from kerogen cracking, and 'secondary' thermal gas from oil cracking. Since thermal cracking of hydrocarbons does not generate products at equilibrium and thermal stress should not bring them to equilibrium over geologic time, we would not expect methane, ethane, and propane to be at eq...

The theory of open quantum systems is used to study the local temperature and heat currents in metallic nanowires connected to leads at different temperatures. We show that for ballistic wires the local temperature is almost uniform along the wire and Fourier’s law is invalid. By gradually increasing disorder, a uniform temperature gradient ensues inside the wire and the thermal current linearl...

A crucial point in statistical mechanics is the definition of the notion of thermal equilibrium, which can be given as the state that maximises the von Neumann entropy, under the validity of some constraints. Arguing that such a notion can never be experimentally probed, in this paper we propose a new notion of thermal equilibrium, focused on observables rather than on the full state of the qua...

In this paper, we investigate thermal equilibrium in string gas cosmology which is dominated by closed string. We consider two interesting regimes, Hagedorn and radiation regimes. We find that for short strings in small radius of Hagedorn regime very large amount of energy requested to have thermal equilibrium but for long strings in such system a few energy is sufficient to have thermal equili...

It was shown that by means of the two-pulse sequence, the spin system of a liquid entrapped into nanosize cavities can be prepared in quasi-equilibrium states of high dipolar order, which relax to thermal equilibrium with the molecular environment with a relaxation time T1d. Measurements of the inverse dipolar temperature and spin-lattice relaxation time in the local fields provide an important...

Local Shannon entropy lies at the heart of modern thermodynamics, with much discussion of trajectory-dependent entropy production. When taken at both boundaries of a process in phase space, it reproduces the second law of thermodynamics over a finite time interval for small scale systems. However, given that entropy is an ensemble property, it has never been clear how one can assign such a quan...

By studying a system of Brownian particles that interact among themselves only through a local velocity-alignment force that does not affect their speed, we show that self-propulsion is not a necessary feature for the flocking transition to take place as long as underdamped particle dynamics can be guaranteed. Moreover, the system transits from stationary phases close to thermal equilibrium, wi...