We review some important recent developments in the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of radiation and matter-radiation mixtures. These include variational principles for nonequilibrium steady states of photons, neutrinos, and matter in local thermodynamic equilibrium. These variational principles can be extended to include mass and chemical potential. The general nature of radiation entropy, entro...

We investigate the response of bulk liquid water to a temperature gradient using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is shown that the thermal gradient polarizes water in the direction of the gradient, leading to a non-negligible electrostatic field whose origin lies in the water reorientation under nonequilibrium conditions. The dependence of the magnitude of the electrostatic fi...

We consider aspects of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics that have traditionally not been considered in irreversible thermodynamics. More specifically we refer to the frenetic contribution in fluctuation and response theory, which complements the entropic component. Frenesy then refers to an amount of volatility or of dynamical activity defined on trajectories in some reduced description. It...

A key feature of nonequilibrium thermodynamics is the Markovian, deterministic relaxation of coarse observables such as, for example, the temperature difference between two macroscopic objects which evolves independently of almost all details of the initial state. We demonstrate that the unitary dynamics for moderately sized spin-1/2 systems may yield the same type of relaxation dynamics for a ...

We build a rigorous nonequilibrium thermodynamic description for open chemical reaction networks of elementary reactions. Their dynamics is described by deterministic rate equations with mass action kinetics. Our most general framework considers open networks driven by time-dependent chemostats. The energy and entropy balances are established and a nonequilibrium Gibbs free energy is introduced...

Glansdorff and Prigogine proposed a decomposition of the entropy production rate, which has more recently been rediscovered in various constructions of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. Their context was irreversible thermodynamics which, while ignoring fluctuations, still allows a somewhat broader treatment than the one based on the Master or Fokker-Planck equation. Glansdorff and Prigogin...

We consider the question of the existence of a generalized H-theorem in the context of the variational method in the information-theoretical approach that generates the nonequilibrium statistical operator formalism. After brie y reviewing how the latter provides mechano-statistical foundations for phenomenological irreversible thermodynamics, the socalled Informational Statistical Thermodynamic...

This review presents results obtained from our group‘s approach to model quantum mechanics with the aid of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. As has been shown, the exact Schrödinger equation can be derived by assuming that a particle of energy  is actually a dissipative system maintained in a nonequilibrium steady state by a constant throughput of energy (heat flow). Here, also other typical quan...

In this paper the linear theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, developed by Onsager and others, is applied to random networks with arbitrary degree distribution. Using the well-known methods of nonequilibrium thermodynamics we identify thermodynamic forces and their conjugated flows induced in networks as a result of single node degree perturbation. The forces and the flows can be understood...

We develop a rigorous nonequilibrium thermodynamics for an open system of nonlinear biochemical reactions responsible for cell signal processing. We show that the quality of the biological switch consisting of a phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycle, such as those in protein kinase cascade, is controlled by the available intracellular free energy from the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) hydrolys...