No current without heat (Q1600027)

In [Entropy production for interacting particle systems, Markov Proc. Rel. Fields 7, 119-134 (2001; Zbl 0987.60100)] the authors provided a mathematical introduction to the concept of entropy production as measuring the deviation of microscopic time reversibility. At the end they asked the question, whether vanishing mean entropy production implies reversibility. In this paper they affirm this. They prove for a large class of interacting particle systems the equivalence of detailed balance (microscopic reversibility) and zero mean entropy production. So there is no spontaneous breaking of time-reversal invariance for these systems. The authors also discuss the basic physical concepts of time-reversal, reversibility and entropy production.