The zeroth and first laws of thermodynamics define the concepts of thermal equilibrium and thermal energy. The second law of thermodynamics determines whether a particular transfer of thermal energy can occur. Collectively, these fundamental laws of nature imply that a closed collection of thermodynamic subsystems will tend to thermal equilibrium. This paper generalizes the concepts of energy, ...

The thermodynamics of an electrically charged, multicomponent continuous medium with electromagnetic fields is analysed in the non-relativistic limit. Applying locally the first and second law of thermodynamics and Maxwell’s equations for a linear theory of electromagnetism, three equations characterising the continuous medium are derived: a thermostatic equilibrium equation, a reversible and a...

A facile approach is reported to process rod-coil block copolymers (BCPs) into highly ordered nanostructures in a rapid, low-energy process. By introducing a selective plasticizer into the rod-coil BCPs during annealing, both the annealing temperature and time to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium and highly ordered structures can be decreased. This process improvement is attributed to enhanced ...

A singular value decomposition (SVD)-based chemometric method is used for deconvolution of spectral information obtained from a single sample containing an equilibrium system with spectral overlapping at different temperatures. The output of analysis is the association constants at each temperature, thermodynamic parameters and the component spectral profiles. Thermodynamic characterization of ...

The magnetization of a system of many mesoscopic rings under nonequilibrium conditions is considered. The corresponding disorder-averaged current in a ring I(phi) is shown to be a sum of the "thermodynamic" and "kinetic" contributions both resulting from the electron-electron interaction. The thermodynamic part can be expressed through the diagonal matrix elements J(micro micro) of the current ...

Our recent quasi-two-dimensional thermodynamic description of thin liquid films stabilized by colloidal particles is generalized to describe nonuniform equilibrium states of films in external potentials and nonequilibrium transport processes produced in the film by gradients of thermodynamic forces. Using a Monte Carlo simulation method, we have determined equilibrium equations of state for a f...

Entanglement within a given device provides a potential resource for quantum information processing. Entanglement between system and environment leads to decoherence (thus suppressing non-classical features within the system) but also opens up a route to robust and universal control. The latter is related to thermodynamic equilibrium, a generic behavior of bi-partite quantum systems. Fingerprin...

A theory for noise-driven subcritical instabilities in spatially extended systems is put forward. The theory allows one to calculate the critical bifurcation parameter for a first-order phase transition in such non-equilibrium systems in the thermodynamic limit and analyse the mechanism of phase transition. Two examples with distinctive features are studied in detail to demonstrate the usefulne...

We use replica exchange Monte Carlo simulations to measure the equilibrium equation of state of the disordered fluid state for a binary hard sphere mixture up to very large densities where standard Monte Carlo simulations do not easily reach thermal equilibrium. For the moderate system sizes we use (up to N = 100), we find no sign of a pressure discontinuity near the location of dynamic glass s...