The performances of solar cells and thermoelectricmaterials are governed by thermodynamics. The material properties of these have temperature dependence due to thermal expansions of lattices and an effect of electron–phonon coupling etc. The temperature-dependent energy levels has been included in statisticalmechanics, naturally requiring a rectification of the second law of thermodynamics with...

Based on a recently developed formalism for mesoscopic stochastic dynamics of single macromolecules, such as motor proteins, in aqueous solution, we demonstrate mathematically the principle of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics originated by the Brussels group. The key concepts of excess entropy and excess entropy production, and their mathematical properties as well as physical interpretations,...

We discuss the thermodynamics of physical adsorption of gases in porous solids. The measurement of the amount of gas adsorbed in a solid requires specialized volumetric and gravimetric techniques based upon the concept of the surface excess. Excess adsorption isotherms provide thermodynamic information about the gas-solid system but are difficult to interpret at high pressure because of peculia...

A semiempirical ansatz to compute anharmonic contributions to the free energy neglected in quasiharmonic calculations is introduced. A parametrized temperature-dependent modification of the vibrational density of states designed to be used directly with the quasiharmonic free-energy expression is proposed. An approximate relationship between the modified frequencies and the renormalized frequen...

We report the direct measurement of thermodynamic properties of colloidal hard spheres by optical microscopy. By using confocal microscopy, we obtain three-dimensional snapshots of a colloidal hard-sphere suspension over a wide range of densities. From these snapshots, the available volume to insert an additional sphere and the surface area of that volume are determined, which are directly rela...