The Second Law For the Transitions Between the Non-equilibrium Steady States

Abstract

We show that the system entropy change for the transitions between non-equilibrium steady states arbitrarily far from equilibrium for any constituting process is given by the relative entropy of the distributions of these steady states. This expression is then shown to relate to the dissipation relations of both Vaikuntanathan and Jarzynski [EPL 87, 60005 (2009)] and Kawai, Parrondo and Van den Broeck [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 080602 (2007)] in the case of energy-conserving driving.