No Arabic abstract
We investigate a thermodynamic arrow associated with quantum projective measurements in terms of the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the probability distribution of energy change caused by the measurements and its time reversal counterpart. Two physical quantities appear to govern the asymptotic values of the time asymmetry. For an initial equilibrium ensemble prepared at a high temperature, the energy fluctuations determine the convergence of the time asymmetry approaching zero. At low temperatures, finite survival probability of the ground state limits the time asymmetry to be less than $ln 2$. We illustrate our results for a concrete system and discuss the fixed point of the time asymmetry in the limit of infinitely repeated projections.
The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of expansion, at a particular epoch in the history of the universe a state that was near maximum entropy under the dominant short range forces becomes extremely unlikely, due to a switchover to newly dominant long range forces. This happened at about the time of decoupling, prior to which I make no statement about arrows. The role of cosmology in thermodynamics was first suggested by T. Gold.
Why time is a one-way corridor? Whats the origin of the arrow of time? We attribute the thermodynamic arrow of time as the direction of increasing quantum state complexity. Inspired by the work of Nielsen, Susskind and Micadei, we checked this hypothesis on both a simple two qubit and a three qubit quantum system. The result shows that in the two qubit system, the thermodynamic arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing quantum state complexity. For the three qubit system, the heat flow pattern among subsystems is closely correlated with the quantum state complexity of the subsystems. We propose that besides its impact on macroscopic spatial geometry, quantum state complexity might also generate the thermodynamic arrow of time.
In classical thermodynamics, heat cannot spontaneously pass from a colder system to a hotter system, which is called the thermodynamic arrow of time. However, if the initial states are entangled, the direction of the thermodynamic arrow of time may not be guaranteed. Here we take the thermofield double state at $0+1$ dimension as the initial state and assume its gravity duality to be the eternal black hole in AdS$_2$ space. We make the temperature difference between the two sides by changing the Hamiltonian. We turn on proper interaction between the two sides and calculate the changes in energy and entropy. The energy transfer, as well as the thermodynamic arrow of time, are mainly determined by the competition between two channels: thermal diffusion and anomalous heat flow. The former is not related to the wormhole and obeys the thermodynamic arrow of time; the latter is related to the wormhole and reverses the thermodynamic arrow of time, i.e. transferring energy from the colder side to the hotter side at the cost of entanglement consumption. Finally, we find that the thermal diffusion wins the competition, and the whole thermodynamic arrow of time has not been reversed.
The excess work performed in a heat-engine process with given finite operation time tau is bounded by the thermodynamic length, which measures the distance during the relaxation along a path in the space of the thermodynamic state. Unfortunately, the thermodynamic length, as a guidance for the heat engine optimization, is beyond the experimental measurement. We propose to measure the thermodynamic length mathcal{L} through the extrapolation of finite-time measurements mathcal{L}(tau)=int_{0}^{tau}[P_{mathrm{ex}}(t)]^{1/2}dt via the excess power P_{mathrm{ex}}(t). The current proposal allows to measure the thermodynamic length for a single control parameter without requiring extra effort to find the optimal control scheme. We illustrate the measurement strategy via examples of the quantum harmonic oscillator with tuning frequency and the classical ideal gas with changing volume.
We investigate the statistical arrow of time for a quantum system being monitored by a sequence of measurements. For a continuous qubit measurement example, we demonstrate that time-reversed evolution is always physically possible, provided that the measurement record is also negated. Despite this restoration of dynamical reversibility, a statistical arrow of time emerges, and may be quantified by the log-likelihood difference between forward and backward propagation hypotheses. We then show that such reversibility is a universal feature of non-projective measurements, with forward or backward Janus measurement sequences that are time-reversed inverses of each other.