CSH Talk by Rudolf Hanel: “Understanding driven and irreversible processes”

The lecture by Rudolf Hanel will take place at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna in Room 201.

If you are interested in participating, please email to office@csh.ac.at

Abstract

We are used to working with independent ensembles or systems exhibiting detailed balance.

If the typical system we are interested in are not of this kind then what happens with our mathematical tools to describe such systems? And can we say anything about how irreversible a process works?

In this lecture we will briefly discuss these two questions. For the first question we briefly look at the maximum configuration entropy of driven processes. For the second question we will look more closely at thermodynamic cycles performed in finite time in a gas kinetic model to find a relation between the length of cycle periods and the amount of irreversible work obey a relation similar to a Heisenberg uncertainty relation.