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An interesting paper has appeared on nature.com:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32815
The abstract:
I expect this to spawn plenty of pop science claims about "scientists say we can reverse entropy". But the paper itself looks like a good discussion of how the second law actually works for quantum systems.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32815
The abstract:
Remarkable progress of quantum information theory (QIT) allowed to formulate mathematical theorems for conditions that data-transmitting or data-processing occurs with a non-negative entropy gain. However, relation of these results formulated in terms of entropy gain in quantum channels to temporal evolution of real physical systems is not thoroughly understood. Here we build on the mathematical formalism provided by QIT to formulate the quantum H-theorem in terms of physical observables. We discuss the manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics in quantum physics and uncover special situations where the second law can be violated. We further demonstrate that the typical evolution of energy-isolated quantum systems occurs with non-diminishing entropy.
I expect this to spawn plenty of pop science claims about "scientists say we can reverse entropy". But the paper itself looks like a good discussion of how the second law actually works for quantum systems.