No Arabic abstract
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 discuss the behavior of the entanglement entropy of the ground state in various collective systems. Results for general quadratic two-mode boson models are given, yielding the relation between quantum phase transitions of the system (signaled by a divergence of the entanglement entropy) and the excitation energies. Such systems naturally arise when expanding collective spin Hamiltonians at leading order via the Holstein-Primakoff mapping. In a second step, we analyze several such models (the Dicke model, the two-level BCS model, the Lieb-Mattis model and the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model) and investigate the properties of the entanglement entropy in the whole parameter range. We show that when the system contains gapless excitations the entanglement entropy of the ground state diverges with increasing system size. We derive and classify the scaling behaviors that can be met.
The zeroth law of thermodynamics involves a transitivity relation (pairwise between three objects) expressed either in terms of `equal temperature (ET), or `in equilibrium (EQ) conditions. In conventional thermodynamics conditional on vanishingly weak system-bath coupling these two conditions are commonly regarded as equivalent. In this work we show that for thermodynamics at strong coupling they are inequivalent: namely, two systems can be in equilibrium and yet have different effective temperatures. A recent result cite{NEqFE} for Gaussian quantum systems shows that an effective temperature $T^{*}$ can be defined at all times during a systems nonequilibrium evolution, but because of the inclusion of interaction energy, after equilibration the systems $T^*$ is slightly higher than the bath temperature $T_{textsc{b}}$, with the deviation depending on the coupling. A second object coupled with a different strength with an identical bath at temperature $T_{textsc{b}}$ will not have the same equilibrated temperature as the first object. Thus $ET eq EQ $ for strong coupling thermodynamics. We then investigate the conditions for dynamical equilibration for two objects 1 and 2 strongly coupled with a common bath $B$, each with a different equilibrated effective temperature. We show this is possible, and prove the existence of a generalized fluctuation-dissipation relation under this configuration. This affirms that `in equilibrium is a valid and perhaps more fundamental notion which the zeroth law for quantum thermodynamics at strong coupling should be based on. Only when the system-bath coupling becomes vanishingly weak that `temperature appearing in thermodynamic relations becomes universally defined and makes better physical sense.
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.
We introduce an axiomatic approach to entropies and relative entropies that relies only on minimal information-theoretic axioms, namely monotonicity under mixing and data-processing as well as additivity for product distributions. We find that these axioms induce sufficient structure to establish continuity in the interior of the probability simplex and meaningful upper and lower bounds, e.g., we find that every relative entropy must lie between the Renyi divergences of order $0$ and $infty$. We further show simple conditions for positive definiteness of such relative entropies and a characterisation in term of a variant of relative trumping. Our main result is a one-to-one correspondence between entropies and relative entropies.
Here we investigate how local properties of particles in a thermal bath influence the thermodynamics of the bath. We utilize nanothermodynamics, based on two postulates: that small systems can be treated self-consistently by coupling to an ensemble of similarly small systems, and that a large ensemble of small systems forms its own thermodynamic bath. We adapt these ideas to study how a large system may subdivide into an ensemble of smaller subsystems, causing internal heterogeneity across multiple size scales. For the semi-classical ideal gas, maximum entropy favors subdividing a large system of atoms into regions of variable size. The mechanism of region formation could come from quantum exchange that makes atoms in each region indistinguishable, while decoherence between regions allows atoms in separate regions to be distinguishable by location. Combining regions reduces the total entropy, as expected when distinguishable particles become indistinguishable, and as required by theorems for sub-additive entropy. Combining large volumes of small regions gives the entropy of mixing for a semi-classical ideal gas, resolving Gibbs paradox without invoking quantum symmetry for distant atoms. Other models we study are based on Ising-like spins in 1-D. We find similarity in the properties of a two-state model in the nanocanonical ensemble and a three-state model in the canonical ensemble. Thus, emergent phenomena may alter the thermal behavior of microscopic models, and the correct ensemble is necessary for fully-accurate predictions. We add a nonlinear correction to Boltzmanns factor in simulations of the Ising-like spins to imitate the dynamics of spin exchange on intermediate lengths, yielding the statistics of indistinguishable states. These simulations exhibit 1/f-like noise at low frequencies (f), and white noise at higher f, similar to the thermal fluctuations found in many materials.