Second law of thermodynamics for relativistic fluids formulated with relative entropy
Abstract
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to equilibrium states is considered and its monotonicity property with respect to an open quantum system evolution is used to obtain second law-like inequalities. We discuss this first for generic quantum systems in contact with a thermal bath and subsequently turn to a formulation suitable for the description of local dynamics in a relativistic quantum field theory. A local version of the second law similar to the one used in relativistic fluid dynamics can be formulated with relative entropy or even relative entanglement entropy in a space-time region bounded by two light cones. We also give an outlook towards isolated quantum field theories and discuss the role of entanglement for relativistic fluid dynamics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2008.02706,
title = {Second law of thermodynamics for relativistic fluids formulated with relative entropy},
author = {Neil Dowling and Stefan Floerchinger and Tobias Haas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.02706},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
15 pages, 3 figures