Nonequilibrium Entropy

Abstract

We consider an isolated system in an arbitrary state and provide a general formulation using first principles for an additive and non-negative statistical quantity that is shown to reproduce the equilibrium thermodynamic entropy of the isolated system. We further show that the statistical quantity represents the nonequilibrium thermodynamic entropy when the latter is a state function of nonequilibrium state variables; see text. We consider an isolated 1-d ideal gas and determine its non-equilibrium statistical entropy as a function of the box size as the gas expands freely isoenergetically, and compare it with the equilibrium thermodynamic entropy S_{0eq}. We find that the statistical entropy is less than S_{0eq} in accordance with the second law, as expected. To understand how the statistical entropy is different from thermodynamic entropy of classical continuum models that is known to become negative under certain conditions, we calculate it for a 1-d lattice model and discover that it can be related to the thermodynamic entropy of the continuum 1-d Tonks gas by taking the lattice spacing {\delta} go to zero, but only if the latter is state-independent. We discuss the semi-classical approximation of our entropy and show that the standard quantity S_{f}(t) in the Boltzmann's H-theorem does not directly correspond to the statistical entropy.