Related papers: Quantal effects and MaxEnt
An interpretation and re-formulation of modern physics which removes the presumption of the space-time continuum, and bases physical theory on a small number of rational and empirical principles. After briefly describing the philosophical…
The maximum entropy principle (MEP) apparently allows us to derive, or justify, fundamental results of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Because of this, a school of thought considers the MEP as a powerful and elegant way to make…
In 1965 Jaynes provided an intuitively simple proof of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as a general requirement for any macroscopic transition to be experimentally reproducible. His proof was based on Boltzmann's formula S = klnW and the…
The formalism of statistical mechanics can be generalized by starting from more general measures of information than the Shannon entropy and maximizing those subject to suitable constraints. We discuss some of the most important examples of…
The universal bound on specific entropy was originally inferred from black hole thermodynamics. We here show from classical thermodynamics alone that for a system at fixed volume or fixed pressure, the ratio of entropy to nonrelativistic…
We present a novel derivation of the constraints required to obtain the underlying principles of statistical mechanics using a maximum entropy framework. We derive the mean value constraints by use of the central limit theorem and the…
The extremization of an appropriate entropic functional may yield to the probability distribution functions maximizing the respective entropic structure. This procedure is known in Statistical Mechanics and Information Theory as Jaynes'…
Convex optimization problems arise naturally in quantum information theory, often in terms of minimizing a convex function over a convex subset of the space of hermitian matrices. In most cases, finding exact solutions to these problems is…
We propose an approach to the realization of many-body quantum state distributions inspired by combined principles of thermodynamics and mesoscopic physics. Its essence is a maximum entropy principle conditioned by conservation laws. We go…
Quantum networks play a key role in many scenarios of quantum information theory. Here we consider the quantum causal networks in the manner of entropy. First we present a revised smooth max-relative entropy of quantum combs, then we…
Many complex systems are characterized by non-Boltzmann distribution functions of their statistical variables. If one wants to -- justified or not -- hold on to the maximum entropy principle for complex statistical systems (non-Boltzmann)…
Maximum Entropy is a powerful concept that entails a sharp separation between relevant and irrelevant variables. It is typically invoked in inference, once an assumption is made on what the relevant variables are, in order to estimate a…
The statistics of work done on a quantum system can be quantified by the two-point measurement scheme. We show how the Shannon entropy of the work distribution admits a general upper bound depending on the initial diagonal entropy, and a…
The foundations of Statistical Mechanics can be recovered almost in their entirety from the Principle of Maximum Entropy. In this work we show that its non-equilibrium generalization, the Principle of Maximum Caliber (Jaynes, 1980), when…
Traditionally, the Method of (Shannon-Kullback's) Relative Entropy Maximization (REM) is considered with linear moment constraints. In this work, the method is studied under frequency moment constraints which are non-linear in…
The Principle of Insufficient Reason (PIR) assigns equal probabilities to each alternative of a random experiment whenever there is no reason to prefer one over the other. The Maximum Entropy Principle (MaxEnt) generalizes PIR to the case…
We demonstrate that the principle of maximum relative entropy (ME), used judiciously, can ease the specification of priors in model selection problems. The resulting effect is that models that make sharp predictions are disfavoured,…
We derive an expression for a density operator estimated via Bayesian quantum inference in the limit of an infinite number of measurements. This expression is derived under the assumption that the reconstructed system is in a pure state. In…
The Boltzmann--Gibbs entropy is a functional on the space of probability measures. When a state space is countable, one characterization of the Boltzmann--Gibbs entropy is given by the Shannon--Khinchin axioms, which consist of continuity,…
Knowing and guessing, these are two essential epistemological pillars in the theory of quantum-mechanical measurement. As formulated quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. In general, a priori unknown states can be completely determined…