Comment on Ben-Amotz and Honig, "Average entropy dissipation in irreversible mesoscopic processes," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 020602 (2006)

Abstract

We point out that most of the classical thermodynamics results in the paper have been known in the literature, see Kestin and Woods, for quite some time and are not new, contrary to what the authors imply. As shown by Kestin, these results are valid for quasistatic irreversible processes only and not for arbitrary irreversible processes as suggested in the paper. Thus, the application to the Jarzynski process is limited.