Related papers: A statistical mechanical interpretation of algorit…
The issue of discrete probability estimation for samples of small size is addressed in this study. The maximum likelihood method often suffers over-fitting when insufficient data is available. Although the Bayesian approach can avoid…
This Colloquium is a fast journey through the build-up of key thermodynamical concepts, i.e. work, heat and irreversibility -- and how they relate to information. Born at the time of industrial revolution to optimize the exploitation of…
Traditional thermodynamics governs the behaviour of large systems that evolve between states of thermal equilibrium. For these large systems, the mean values of thermodynamic quantities (such as work, heat and entropy) provide a good…
Information-theoretic quantities, such as entropy, are used to quantify the amount of information a given variable provides. Entropies can be used together to compute the mutual information, which quantifies the amount of information two…
Black holes are thermodynamic objects, but despite recent progress, the ultimate statistical mechanical origin of black hole temperature and entropy remains mysterious. Here I summarize an approach in which the entropy is viewed as arising…
Physics concepts have often been borrowed and independently developed by other fields of science. In this perspective a significant example is that of entropy in Information Theory. The aim of this paper is to provide a short and…
We develop an axiomatic reconstruction of thermodynamics based entirely on two primitive components: a description of what aspects of a system are observed and a reference measure that encodes the underlying descriptive convention. These…
Thermodynamics is based on a coarse-grained approach, from which its fundamental variables emerge, effectively erasing the complicate details of the microscopic dynamics within a macroscopic system. The strength of Thermodynamics lies in…
The concept of negative temperature has recently received renewed interest in the context of debates about the correct definition of the thermodynamic entropy in statistical mechanics. Several researchers have identified the thermodynamic…
Information thermodynamics relates the rate of change of mutual information between two interacting subsystems to their thermodynamics when the joined system is described by a bipartite stochastic dynamics satisfying local detailed balance.…
Entropy rate of sequential data-streams naturally quantifies the complexity of the generative process. Thus entropy rate fluctuations could be used as a tool to recognize dynamical perturbations in signal sources, and could potentially be…
The intersection of thermodynamics, quantum theory and gravity has revealed many profound insights, all the while posing new puzzles. In this article, we discuss an extension of equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics…
We examine the fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics, dividing the problem into a discussion purely about probability, which we analyse from a Bayesian standpoint. We argue that the existence of a unique maximising probability…
In this note we describe some results concerning non-relativistic quantum systems at positive temperature and density confined to macroscopically large regions of physical space which are under the influence of some local, time-dependent…
We study information storage in noisy quantum registers and computers using the methods of statistical dynamics. We develop the concept of a strictly contractive quantum channel in order to construct mathematical models of physically…
We report model calculations of the time-dependent internal energy and entropy for a single quasi-free massive quantum particle at a constant temperature. We show that the whole process started from a fully coherent quantum state to…
A set of core features is set forth as the essence of a thermodynamic description, which derive from large-deviation properties in systems with hierarchies of timescales, but which are \emph{not} dependent upon conservation laws or…
Stochastic thermodynamics as reviewed here systematically provides a framework for extending the notions of classical thermodynamics like work, heat and entropy production to the level of individual trajectories of well-defined…
The information-carrying capacity of a memory is known to be a thermodynamic resource facilitating the conversion of heat to work. Szilard's engine explicates this connection through a toy example involving an energy-degenerate two-state…
The formalism used in describing the thermodynamics of abrupt (or first-order) phase transitions is reviewed as an application of maximum entropy inference. In this treatment, we show that the concepts of transition temperature, latent heat…