"Heating vs. Cooling: Fundamental Efficiency Asymmetry Uncovered by Scientists"
Scientists from Spain and Germany have discovered a fundamental asymmetry showing that heating is consistently faster than cooling, challenging conventional expectations in thermodynamics. They introduced the concept of "thermal kinematics" to explain this phenomenon, which involves the exchange and redistribution of energy among individual particles within a system. The researchers used optical tweezers to observe and quantify the dynamics of microscopic systems undergoing thermal relaxation, and their findings could have implications for the development of new general theories for the dynamics of Brownian systems driven far from equilibrium.