Abstract

In the first part of the talk I will review the informational approach to thermodynamics and I will present a new second law that takes the form of an equality instead of an inequality. From this equality one can derive the standard second law inequality plus an additional infinite family of inequalities, which provide constraints on the work fluctuations. In the second part of the talk I will present a derivation of the third law of thermodynamics, which shows the impossibility of cooling matter to absolute zero, and quantifies the resources that are necessary to achieve any given temperature. This result also implies the impossibility of exact information erasure and quantifies the necessary resources for achieving any error. (This talk is based on arXiv:1601.05799 and arXiv:1412.3828.)