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 ...

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 ...

Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems. The law is a bedrock of physics, but has long failed to describe systems that are out of ...

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. Since the steam engine began modernizing the world, the second ...

Image of argon plasma glowing a bluish color in an experiment at the WVU Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics. (Credit: WVU Photo/Brian Persinger) The four laws of thermodynamics are an established ...

Scientists are mashing up steamy old thermodynamics and cutting-edge quantum mechanics into a new field they’re calling quantum steampunk. By combining some of the most established 19th-century ...

Water is the most mundane liquid on Earth, yet it almost breaks the rules of thermodynamics. Every other known liquid shrinks ...

Researchers from the Nagoya University and Slovak Academy of Sciences have made a ground-breaking discovery that sheds new light on how quantum theory and thermodynamics interact. The group showed ...

The likelihood of seeing quantum systems violating the second law of thermodynamics has been calculated by UCL scientists. "The vast majority of the time, the second law of thermodynamics is obeyed.

Ensuring that different clocks are giving the same time is crucial to enable electronic systems to talk to each other. But what is the cost of this synchronisation at the thermodynamic level? To ...