No Arabic abstract
Many thermodynamic relations involve inequalities, with equality if a process does not involve dissipation. In this article we provide equalities in which the dissipative contribution is shown to involve the relative entropy (a.k.a. Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions both in classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. As an application, the relative entropy is related to transport coefficients.
Many thermodynamic relations involve inequalities, with equality if a process does not involve dissipation. In this article we provide equalities in which the dissipative contribution is shown to involve the relative entropy (a.k.a. Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions both in classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. By calculating a transport coefficient we show that indeed---at least in this case---the source of dissipation in that coefficient is the relative entropy.
Thermodynamics is usually developed starting from entropy and the maximum entropy principle. We investigate here to what extent one can replace entropy with relative entropy which has several advantages, for example in the context of local quantum field theory. We find that the principle of maximum entropy can be replaced by a principle of minimum expected relative entropy. Various ensembles and their thermodynamic potentials can be defined through relative entropy. We also show that thermal fluctuations are in fact governed by a relative entropy. Furthermore we reformulate the third law of thermodynamics using relative entropy only.
We analyze the stochastic evolution and dephasing of a qubit within the quantum jump (QJ) approach. It allows one to treat individual realizations of inelastic processes, and in this way it provides solutions, for instance, to problems in quantum thermodynamics and distributions in statistical mechanics. As a solvable example, we study a qubit in the weak dissipation limit, and demonstrate that dephasing and relaxation render the Jarzynski and Crooks fluctuation relations (FRs) of non-equilibrium thermodynamics intact. On the contrary, the standard two-measurement protocol, taking into account only the fluctuations of the internal energy $U$, leads to deviations in FRs under the same conditions. We relate the average $langle e^{-beta U} rangle $ (where $beta$ is the inverse temperature) with the qubits relaxation and dephasing rates, and discuss this relationship for different mechanisms of decoherence.
In this work, we show that the dissipation in a many-body system under an arbitrary non-equilibrium process is related to the R{e}nyi divergences between two states along the forward and reversed dynamics under very general family of initial conditions. This relation generalizes the links between dissipated work and Renyi divergences to quantum systems with conserved quantities whose equilibrium state is described by the generalized Gibbs ensemble. The relation is applicable for quantum systems with conserved quantities and can be applied to protocols driving the system between integrable and chaotic regimes. We demonstrate our ideas by considering the one-dimensional transverse quantum Ising model which is driven out of equilibrium by the instantaneous switching of the transverse magnetic field.
Spin chains with open boundaries, such as the transverse field Ising model, can display coherence times for edge spins that diverge with the system size as a consequence of almost conserved operators, the so-called strong zero modes. Here, we discuss the fate of these coherence times when the system is perturbed in two different ways. First, we consider the effects of a unitary coupling connecting the ends of the chain; when the coupling is weak and non-interacting, we observe stable long-lived harmonic oscillations between the strong zero modes. Second, and more interestingly, we consider the case when dynamics becomes dissipative. While in general dissipation induces decoherence and loss of information, here we show that particularly simple environments can actually enhance correlation times beyond those of the purely unitary case. This allows us to generalise the notion of strong zero modes to irreversible Markovian time-evolutions, thus defining conditions for {em dissipative strong zero maps}. Our results show how dissipation could, in principle, play a useful role in protocols for storing information in quantum devices.