Relative entropy, interaction energy and the nature of dissipation

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. 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.

References in corpus (2)

• Dissipation: The phase-space perspective
• Ratcheting up energy by means of measurement

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Stochastic Thermodynamics of Non-reciprocally Interacting Particles and Fields
• Underscreening and hidden ion structures in large scale simulations of concentrated electrolytes
• Inferring entropy production rate from partially observed Langevin dynamics under coarse-graining