We will discuss the link between scientific explanations and probabilities, specially in relationship with statistical mechanics and the derivation of macroscopic laws from microscopic ones.
Fractional Brownian motion is a non-Markovian Gaussian process indexed by the Hurst exponent $Hin [0,1]$, generalising standard Brownian motion to account for anomalous diffusion. Functionals of this process are important for practical applications as a standard reference point for non-equilibrium dynamics. We describe a perturbation expansion allowing us to evaluate many non-trivial observables analytically: We generalize the celebrated three arcsine-laws of standard Brownian motion. The functionals are: (i) the fraction of time the process remains positive, (ii) the time when the process last visits the origin, and (iii) the time when it achieves its maximum (or minimum). We derive expressions for the probability of these three functionals as an expansion in $epsilon = H-tfrac{1}{2}$, up to second order. We find that the three probabilities are different, except for $H=tfrac{1}{2}$ where they coincide. Our results are confirmed to high precision by numerical simulations.
The Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory is an effective framework to describe transports and their fluctuations in classical out-of-equilibrium diffusive systems. Whether the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory may be extended to the quantum realm and which form this extension may take is yet terra incognita but is a timely question. In this short introductory review, I discuss possible questions that a quantum version of the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory could address and how analysing Quantum Simple Exclusion Processes yields pieces of answers to these questions.
In this paper, we investigate a characterization of Quantum Mechanics by two physical principles based on general probabilistic theories. We first give the operationally motivated definition of the physical equivalence of states and consider the principle of the physical equivalence of pure states, which turns out to be equivalent to the symmetric structure of the state space. We further consider another principle of the decomposability with distinguishable pure states. We give classification theorems of the state spaces for each principle, and derive the Bloch ball in 2 and 3 dimensional systems by these principles.
We use fluctuating hydrodynamics to analyze the dynamical properties in the non-equilibrium steady state of a diffusive system coupled with reservoirs. We derive the two-time correlations of the density and of the current in the hydrodynamic limit in terms of the diffusivity and the mobility. Within this hydrodynamic framework we discuss a generalization of the fluctuation dissipation relation in a non-equilibrium steady state where the response function is expressed in terms of the two-time correlations. We compare our results to an exact solution of the symmetric exclusion process. This exact solution also allows one to directly verify the fluctuating hydrodynamics equation.
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.