In the strange, often unintuitive world of quantum physics, one mystery has stood out for decades: Can quantum entanglement be manipulated in a reversible way, like energy in a perfect heat engine?

A long-standing law of thermodynamics turns out to have a loophole at the smallest scales. Researchers have shown that quantum engines made of correlated particles can exceed the traditional ...

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. If there’s one law of physics ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Quantum mechanics is the most successful ...

Heat always spontaneously flows from a hotter place to a colder one – so says the second law of thermodynamics. But within an extremely sparse gas, the opposite may be possible, with heat flowing from ...

While quantum entanglement mimicks the first law of thermodynamics in terms of entropy in a system, scientists wonder if the second law—especially the part about reversibility—could hold true. A new ...