Thermodynamics articles within Nature Physics

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heating and cooling are shown to happen along distinct thermodynamic pathways, which makes the former faster than the latter. This finding calls for a rethink of the fundamentals of thermalization processes at the microscale and of devices like Brownian heat engines.

    • M. Ibáñez
    • , C. Dieball
    •  & R. A. Rica

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Material characterization of liquids in extreme thermodynamic conditions is a challenging technical problem. Brillouin scattering metrology in an optical fibre design with a sealed liquid core now enables spatially resolved temperature and pressure measurements, using carbon disulfide as an example.

    • Andreas Geilen
    • , Alexandra Popp
    •  & Birgit Stiller

  • Article |

    The iron–nickel alloy Invar has an extremely small coefficient of thermal expansion that has been difficult to explain theoretically. A study of Invar under pressure now suggests that there is a cancellation of phonon and spin contributions to expansion.

    • S. H. Lohaus
    • , M. Heine
    •  & B. Fultz

  • News & Views |

    A real qubit is not an isolated unitary quantum system but is subject to noise from its environment. An experiment has now turned this interaction on its head, controlling the environment using the qubit itself.

    • Bayan Karimi
    •  & Jukka P. Pekola

  • Article |

    The performance of superconducting qubits is often limited by spurious two-level systems. Now, a qubit operating as a heat engine manipulates its bath of nearby two-level systems, providing insights into their dynamics and interactions.

    • Martin Spiecker
    • , Patrick Paluch
    •  & Ioan M. Pop

  • Article |

    Probing strongly interacting quantum systems with high spatial resolution can be challenging. An experiment now uses disorder in nuclear spin chains as a local probe to investigate spin and energy hydrodynamics.

    • Pai Peng
    • , Bingtian Ye
    •  & Paola Cappellaro

  • News & Views |

    The magnetic flux in a superconducting loop can only change by discrete jumps called phase slips. The energy dissipated by an individual phase slip has now been detected thanks to advances in precision temperature measurements.

    • José Aumentado

  • Article |

    A quantum many-body system’s equilibrium behaviour is described by its partition function, which is hard to compute. Now it has been shown that the easier task of finding an approximation could define a distinct class of computational problems.

    • Sergey Bravyi
    • , Anirban Chowdhury
    •  & Pawel Wocjan

  • News & Views |

    Thermodynamic concepts can be used to understand nonlinear wave systems, but direct evidence for these analogies is scarce. Experiments with multimode fibres have now enabled direct measurement of the thermalization process of optical waves.

    • Pierre Suret

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Although magnons in the quantum Hall regime of graphene have been detected, their thermodynamic properties have not yet been measured. Now, a local probe technique enables the detection of the magnon density and chemical potential.

    • Andrew T. Pierce
    • , Yonglong Xie
    •  & Amir Yacoby

  • Article |

    A time–information uncertainty relation in thermodynamics has been derived, analogous to the time–energy uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics, imposing limits on the speed of energy and entropy exchange between a system and external reservoirs.

    • Schuyler B. Nicholson
    • , Luis Pedro García-Pintos
    •  & Jason R. Green

  • Research Highlight |

    • Elizaveta Dubrovina

  • News & Views |

    Equilibrium self-assembly processes find free-energy minima but no such general statement holds for systems driven out of equilibrium. A new study has employed laser-induced convective flows to achieve dissipative self-assembly across multiple scales with universal growth and fluctuation statistics.

    • Gili Bisker

  • News & Views |

    Synchronization of biochemical oscillators that are responsible for biological rhythms costs free energy. This theoretical result suggests that part of the adenosine triphosphate molecules consumed by a Kai oscillator is necessary for synchronization.

    • Andre C. Barato

  • Perspective |

    A new class of inequalities known as thermodynamic uncertainty relations provides quantitative tools for the description of physical systems out of equilibrium. A perspective is offered on these results and their future developments.

    • Jordan M. Horowitz
    •  & Todd R. Gingrich

  • Letter |

    A continuous version of the Maxwell demon is a machine that repeatedly monitors a system, but extracts work only on state change. Arbitrarily large quantities of work can thus be extracted, as demonstrated by DNA hairpin pulling experiments.

    • M. Ribezzi-Crivellari
    •  & F. Ritort

  • Perspective |

    Recent developments have seen concepts originally developed in quantum information theory, such as entanglement and quantum error correction, come to play a fundamental role in understanding quantum gravity.

    • Xiao-Liang Qi

  • Letter |

    The many phases of water ice continue to be fertile ground for surprising discoveries. This latest study reveals that ice II vanishes from the phase diagram of water upon the addition of small amounts of ammonium fluoride.

    • Jacob J. Shephard
    • , Ben Slater
    •  & Christoph G. Salzmann

  • Letter |

    Erasing a bit of information has a fundamental, minimal energy cost that is given by the Landauer limit. The erasure of quantum information from a quantum-spin memory register encoded in a molecular nanomagnet is shown to obey the same principle.

    • R. Gaudenzi
    • , E. Burzurí
    •  & F. Luis

  • News & Views |

    A curious peak in the distribution describing stochastic switching in bacterial motility had researchers confounded. But a careful study performed under varying mechanical conditions has now revealed that the breaking of detailed balance is to blame.

    • Yuhai Tu

  • Measure for Measure |

    The bit is a proper unit of measurement and should be recognized as such, argues Iulia Georgescu.

    • Iulia Georgescu

  • Letter |

    A colloidal particle connected to suspensions of motile bacteria forms a model system for studying microscale engines in contact with active baths. The engine outperforms its passive counterparts due to the presence of non-Gaussian fluctuations.

    • Sudeesh Krishnamurthy
    • , Subho Ghosh
    •  & A. K. Sood

  • Letter |

    A system in equilibrium takes a finite time to relax to a new equilibrium following a sudden change of a control parameter—impeding progress in device miniaturization. Now, a strategy succeeds in reducing this time for an open classical system.

    • Ignacio A. Martínez
    • , Artyom Petrosyan
    •  & Sergio Ciliberto

  • News & Views |

    Living systems are constantly being driven out of equilibrium by consuming energy. Studying fluctuations can tell us how they do so while maintaining order — and what this teaches us about non-equilibrium processes in general.

    • Ana-Sunčana Smith

  • Article |

    In a Fermi gas with s-wave interactions the contact relations link the thermodynamic and microscopic properties. For the p-wave case two new types of contacts that characterize the interactions have now been measured experimentally.

    • Christopher Luciuk
    • , Stefan Trotzky
    •  & Joseph H. Thywissen

  • Letter |

    Quantum mechanics sets a fundamental upper limit for the flow of heat. Such quantum-limited heat conduction is now observed over macroscopic distances, extending to a metre, in superconducting transmission lines.

    • Matti Partanen
    • , Kuan Yen Tan
    •  & Mikko Möttönen

  • Letter |

    Despite the simplicity of the Carnot cycle, realizing it at the microscale is complicated by the difficulty in implementing adiabatic processes. A clever solution subjects a charged particle to a noisy electrostatic force that mimics a thermal bath.

    • I. A. Martínez
    • , É. Roldán
    •  & R. A. Rica

  • Article |

    Cells rely on coherent oscillatory processes, despite being subject to large fluctuations from their environment. Simple motifs found in all oscillatory systems are studied to determine the thermodynamic cost of maintaining this coherence.

    • Yuansheng Cao
    • , Hongli Wang
    •  & Yuhai Tu

  • News & Views |

    Selective evaporation of one component from a mixture is a common process, but in the case of ultracold atomic gases, distillation is more complex.

    • Trey Porto

  • News & Views |

    Brownian motion in a feedback-controlled optical trap provides a minimal experimental realization of a Szilárd engine, confirming fluctuation theorems and demonstrating the importance of spontaneous symmetry breaking in small thermodynamic systems.

    • Jörn Dunkel

  • News & Views |

    A careful revision of the rudiments of statistical physics shows that negative temperatures are artefacts of Boltzmann's approximate definition of entropy. Gibbs' version, however, forbids negative absolute temperatures and is consistent with thermodynamics.

    • Igor M. Sokolov

  • Article |

    It is shown that for thermodynamics and statistical physics to be internally consistent, Gibbs’ original—rather than Boltzmann’s widely used—definition of entropy needs to be adopted. Consequently, negative absolute temperatures are strictly forbidden, and cold-atom gases are unlikely to be laboratory analogues to dark energy.

    • Jörn Dunkel
    •  & Stefan Hilbert

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