A General Derivation and Quantification of the Third Law of Thermodynamics

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2017 Mar 15

PMID 28290452

Citations 9

Authors

Lluis Masanes

Jonathan Oppenheim

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The most accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics, the unattainability principle, states that any process cannot reach absolute zero temperature in a finite number of steps and within a finite time. Here, we provide a derivation of the principle that applies to arbitrary cooling processes, even those exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics or involving an infinite-dimensional reservoir. We quantify the resources needed to cool a system to any temperature, and translate these resources into the minimal time or number of steps, by considering the notion of a thermal machine that obeys similar restrictions to universal computers. We generally find that the obtainable temperature can scale as an inverse power of the cooling time. Our results also clarify the connection between two versions of the third law (the unattainability principle and the heat theorem), and place ultimate bounds on the speed at which information can be erased.

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