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 failed to describe systems that are out of ...

West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma ...

Preserving quantum information is key to developing useful quantum computing systems. But interacting quantum systems are chaotic and follow laws of thermodynamics, eventually leading to information ...

For more than a century, thermodynamics has described how heat flows and engines run, while quantum mechanics has ruled the strange behavior of atoms and photons. Physicists have long suspected that ...

The laws of thermodynamics are pretty straightforward: Normally, heat from a hot object will flow to a cold one until they reach the same temperature, bringing the system to a state of equilibrium.