It is unquestionable that the concept of entropy has played an essential role both in the physical and biological sciences. However, the entropy production, crucial to the second law, has also other features not clearly conceived. We all know that the main difficulty is concerned with its quantification in non-equilibrium processes and consequently its value for some specific cases is limited. In this work we will review the ideas behind the entropy production concept and we will give some insights about its relevance.

In this paper, the stochastic diffusion process of a charged classical harmonic oscillator in a constant magnetic field is exactly described through the analytical solution of the associated Langevin equation. Due to the presence of the magnetic field, stochastic diffusion takes place across and along the magnetic field. Along the magnetic field, the Brownian motion is exactly the same as that of the ordinary one-dimensional classical harmonic oscillator, which was very well described in Chandrasekhar’s celebrated paper [Rev. Mod. Phys. 15, 1 (1943)]. Across the magnetic field, the stochastic process takes place on a plane, perpendicular to the magnetic field. For internally Gaussian white noise, this planar-diffusion process is exactly described through the first two moments of the positions and velocities and their corresponding cross correlations. In the absence of the magnetic field, our analytical results are the same as those calculated by Chandrasekhar for the ordinary harmonic oscillator. The stochastic planar diffusion is also well characterized in the overdamped approximation, through the solutions of the Langevin equation.

In 1922 Becker found an exact solution for shock waves in gases using the Navier–Stokes–Fourier constitutive equations for a Prandtl number of value 3/4 with constant transport coefficients. His analysis has been extended to study some cases where an implicit solution can be found in an exact way. In this work we consider this problem for the so-called soft-spheres model in which the viscosity and thermal conductivity are proportional to a power of the temperature $\eta ,\kappa \propto T^{\sigma }$. In particular, we give implicit exact solutions for the Maxwell model ($\sigma =1$), hard spheres ($\sigma =1/2$), and when $\sigma$ (the viscosity index) is a natural number.

We use the Navier-Stokes-Fourier constitutive equations to study plane shock waves in dilute gases. It is shown that the experimental information on the normalized density profiles can be fit by using the so-called soft sphere model, in which the viscosity and thermal conductivity are proportional to a power of the temperature.