Dissipation in gases trapped in time-dependent external potentials

Abstract

We investigate an ideal gas in a time--dependent external trapping potential. We use the Boltzmann equation with the relaxation time ansatz to explore the time--dependent energy of an adiabatically isolated system. In particular we are interested on the dissipation during a potential change along a given protocol with finite velocity. The role of the relaxation less evolution as a limiting case is studied: starting from an equilibrium distribution and for small times the energy of the gas with relaxation is always smaller than that of the relaxation--less. This means that relaxation processes show an ambivalent behavior: on the one hand entropy production, but on the other hand reduction of dissipation by driving back the system into equilibrium.