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 ...

A growing body of theoretical and experimental work in physics is converging on a striking possibility: time, the dimension humans experience as a constant forward flow, may not be a fundamental ...

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 ...

As with many branches of physics and engineering, a common point of debate and research is: Under what conditions do the classical laws and theories of physics break down and quantum theories are ...

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. Since the steam engine began modernizing the world, the second ...

We are used to heat flowing from hot objects to cool ones, and never the other way round, but now researchers have found it is possible to pull off this trick in the strange realm of quantum mechanics ...

It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless.

The likelihood of seeing quantum systems violating the second law of thermodynamics has been calculated by UCL scientists. "The vast majority of the time, the second law of thermodynamics is obeyed.