Informational non-equilibrium concentration
Abstract
Informational contributions to thermodynamics can be studied in isolation by considering systems with fully-degenerate Hamiltonians. In this regime, being in non-equilibrium -- termed informational non-equilibrium -- provides thermodynamic resources, such as extractable work, solely from the information content. The usefulness of informational non-equilibrium creates an incentive to obtain more of it, motivating the question of how to concentrate it: can we increase the local informational non-equilibrium of a product state under a global closed system (unitary) evolution? We fully solve this problem analytically, showing that it is impossible for two-qubits, and it is always possible to find states achieving this in higher dimensions. Specifically for two-qutrits, we find that there is a single unitary achieving optimal concentration for every state, for which we uncover a Mepmba-like effect. We further discuss the notion of bound resources in this framework, initial global correlations' ability to activate concentration, and applications to concentrating purity and intrinsic randomness.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.12759,
title = {Informational non-equilibrium concentration},
author = {Chung-Yun Hsieh and Benjamin Stratton and Hao-Cheng Weng and Valerio Scarani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.12759},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
5+3 pages, 2 figures, closed to published version