the adiabatic piston a perpetuum mobile in the mesoscopic realm绝热活塞一个永动机在介观领域.pdfVIP

Entropy 2004, 6, 50-56 Entropy ISSN 1099-4300 /entropy/ The adiabatic piston : a perpetuum mobile in the mesoscopic realm 1,2 2 3 Bruno Crosignani , Paolo Di Porto , Claudio Conti 1Department of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA 2Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita’ dell’Aquila, 67010 L’Aquila, Italy and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Universita’ di Roma “La Sapienza”, 00185 Roma, Italy 3Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Universita’ Roma Tre, 00146 Roma, Italy Received: 23 September 2003 / Accepted: 15 December 2003 / Published: 11 March 2004 Abstract: 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. Keywords: Brownian motors, perpetuum mobile, second law PACS: 05.70.-a, 05.40.-a, 05.20.-y The status of the second law of thermodynamics and the possibility that its standard interpretation may not be valid when dealing with mesoscopic regimes, in particular over temporal an