Violation of the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics in Systems with Negative Specific Heat

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that systems with negative specific heat can violate the zeroth law of thermodynamics, leading to irreversible entropy increase and phase separation when thermally coupled.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis showing the violation of the zeroth law in negative specific heat systems through simulations and exact thermodynamic calculations.

Findings

Negative specific heat systems can violate the zeroth law.

Thermal coupling leads to irreversible entropy increase.

Final equilibrium involves phase separation with different internal energies.

Abstract

We show that systems with negative specific heat can violate the zeroth law of thermodynamics. By both numerical simulations and by using exact expressions for free energy and microcanonical entropy it is shown that if two systems with the same intensive parameters but with negative specific heat are thermally coupled, they undergo a process in which the total entropy increases irreversibly. The final equilibrium is such that two phases appear, that is, the subsystems have different magnetizations and internal energies at temperatures which are equal in both systems, but that can be different from the initial temperature.