• Submit to Entropy Login Register
• MDPI
• Journals A-Z
• For Authors
• For Editors
• About
• Open Access Policy

• Abstract
• Full-Text PDF [265 KB]

• Article Statistics
• Google Scholar
• Order Reprints

• Cite this article
• Export to BibTeX
• Export to EndNote

• [+] on DOAJ
• Crosignani, B
• Porto, P
• Conti, C
• [+] on Google Scholar
• Crosignani, B
• Porto, P
• Conti, C
• [+] on PubMed
• Crosignani, B
• Porto, P
• Conti, C

•  CiteULike
•  Facebook
•  Mendeley
•  Twitter

This article is

• freely available
• re-usable

Entropy 2004, 6(1), 50-56; doi:10.3390/e6010050

Article

The adiabatic piston: a perpetuum mobile in the mesoscopic realm

Bruno Crosignani ^1,2,* , Paolo Porto Di ²  and Claudio Conti ³

¹ Department of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA ² Dipartimento di Fisica, Universitá dell'Aquila, 67010 L'Aquila, Italy ³ Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Universitá Roma Tre, 00146 Roma, Italy

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 23 September 2003 / Accepted: 15 December 2003 / Published: 11 March 2004

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Quantum Limits to the Second Law of Thermodynamics)

Download PDF Full-Text [265 KB, uploaded 16 September 2008 11:01 CEST]

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

Article Statistics

Cite This Article