For two centuries, students have learned that heat flows and engines work according to rigid limits that no machine can beat.

A great number of scientific papers and publications come out of the Aspen Center for Physics, but none quite like Assa Auerbach’s latest. The Israeli physicist’s new graphic novel, “Max the Demon vs.

Thermodynamics was built to describe steam engines and stars, yet the same equations now sit at the heart of quantum computers and nanoscale devices. As physicists push into regimes where individual ...

As with many branches of physics and engineering, a common point of debate and research is: Under what conditions do the classical laws and theories of physics break down and quantum theories are ...

Almost exactly 200 years ago, French physicist Sadi Carnot determined the maximum efficiency of heat engines. The Carnot ...

A December 10–12 working group met to bring together researchers from two fields — neuromorphic computing and stochastic ...

Physicists in the UK and Russia have revived concepts first put forth in the 1940s to develop a new theory of the heat capacity of liquids. Created by Dima Bolmatov and Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary, ...

Thermodynamics and statistical physics provide a unified framework linking the macroscopic laws of energy, work, and entropy to the microscopic motions of particles. Thermodynamics, rooted in the laws ...

Thermal operations are an operational model of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics. In the absence of coherence between energy levels, exact state transition conditions under thermal operations are ...

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Imagine a box filled with a variety of atoms and molecules in proportions roughly equivalent to the composition of the prebiotic soup in which life thrives.