The adiabatic piston: a perpetuum mobile in the mesoscopic realm

Entropy

Bruno Crosignani¹  Paolo Porto¹ 

[1] ¹Department of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA ²Dipartimento di Fisica, Universitá dell'Aquila, 67010 L'Aquila, Italy ³Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Universitá Roma Tre, 00146 Roma, Italy

关键词: Brownian motors;    perpetuum mobile;    second law;   

DOI  :  10.3390/e6010050

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

A detailed analysis of the adiabatic-piston problem reveals, for a finely-tuned choice of the spatial dimensions of the system, peculiar dynamical features that challenge the statement that an isolated system necessarily reaches a time-independent equilibrium state. In particular, the piston behaves like a perpetuum mobile, i.e., it never comes to a stop but keeps wandering, undergoing sizeable oscillations around the position corresponding to maximum entropy; this has remarkable implications on the entropy changes of a mesoscopic isolated system and on the limits of validity of the second law of thermodynamics in the mesoscopic realm.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.