The laws of thermodynamics don't accurately account for the complex processes in living cells – do we need a new one to ...

For more than a century, gravity has been the stubborn outlier in physics, perfectly described on cosmic scales yet refusing to mesh with the quantum rules that govern everything else. A growing camp ...

The light interacts with the cavity and makes an arbitrary number of bounces before leaking out. This emergent light is traditionally treated as heat in quantum simulations. However, it can still be ...

Researchers have devised a new way to define thermodynamic concepts in microscopic quantum systems, where conventional distinctions between heat and work begin to blur. Researchers at the University o ...

Thermodynamics was built to describe steam engines and stars, yet the same equations now sit at the heart of quantum ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: 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 ...

Quantum thermal machines are devices that leverage quantum mechanical effects to convert energy into useful work or cooling, ...

In real life, laws are broken all the time. Besides your everyday criminals, there are scammers and fraudsters, politicians and mobsters, corporations and nations that regard laws as suggestions ...

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including ...

One of the enormous conceptual ideas that came along with Einstein's theory of relativity was the surprise that time itself, long considered fundamental and universal, is actually relative. Different ...

When French engineer Sadi Carnot calculated the maximum efficiency of a heat engine in 1824, he had no idea what heat was. In those days, physicists thought heat was a fluid called caloric. But Carnot ...