The many faces of the second law

Abstract

There exists no perpetuum mobile of the second kind. We review the implications of this observation on the second law, on the efficiency of thermal machines, on Onsager symmetry, on Brownian motors and Brownian refrigerators, and on the universality of efficiency of thermal machines at maximum power. We derive a microscopic expression for the stochastic entropy production, and obtain from it the detailed and integral fluctuation theorem. We close with the remarkable observation that the second law can be split in two: the total entropy production is the sum of two contributions each of which is growing independently in time.