Related papers: Limits on Inferring the Past
The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…
For a stochastic process $(X_t)_{t\geq 0}$ we establish conditions under which the inverse first-passage time problem has a solution for any random variable $\xi >0$. For Markov processes we give additional conditions under which the…
Quantifying irreversibility of a system using finite information constitutes a major challenge in stochastic thermodynamics. We introduce an observable that measures the time-reversal asymmetry between two states after a given time lag. Our…
We report on a numerical experiment performed to analyze fluctuations of the entropy production in turbulent thermal convection, a physical configuration that represents here a prototypical case of an out-of-equilibrium dissipative system.…
We consider the standard thermodynamic processes with constraints, but with additional uncertainty about the control parameters. Motivated by inductive reasoning, we assign prior distribution that provides a rational guess about likely…
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…
Making accurate inferences about data is a key task in science and mathematics. Here we study the problem of \emph{retrodiction}, inferring past values of a series, in the context of chaotic dynamical systems. Specifically, we are…
Some interactions between classical or quantum fields and matter are known to be irreversible processes. Here we associate an entropy to the electromagnetic field from well-known notions of statistical quantum mechanics, in particular the…
We quantify the prior information to infer the optimal characteristics for a constrained thermodynamic process of maximum work extraction for a pair of non-identical finite systems. The total entropy of the whole system remains conserved.…
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.…
The thermodynamic definition of entropy can be extended to nonequilibrium systems based on its relation to information. To apply this definition in practice requires access to the physical system's microstates, which may be prohibitively…
The steady state of a Langevin equation with short ranged memory and coloured noise is analyzed. When the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of second kind is not satisfied, the dynamics is irreversible, i.e. detailed balance is violated. We…
On the basis of the balance equations for energy-momentum, spin, particle and entropy density, an approach is considered which represents a comparatively general framework for special- and general-relativistic continuum thermodynamics. In…
The resource theory of thermal operations, an established model for small-scale thermodynamics, provides an extension of equilibrium thermodynamics to nonequilibrium situations. On a lattice of any dimension with any translation-invariant…
A positive rate of entropy production at steady state is a distinctive feature of truly non-equilibrium processes. Exact results, while being often limited to simple models, offer a unique opportunity to explore the thermodynamic features…
We propose a Langevin equation for systems in an environment with nonuniform temperature. At odds with an older proposal, ours admits a locally Maxwellian steady state, local equipartition holds and for detailed-balanced (reversible)…
Information dynamics is an emerging description of information processing in complex systems which describes systems in terms of intrinsic computation, identifying computational primitives of information storage and transfer. In this paper…
We study the convergence to equilibrium of an underdamped Langevin equation that is controlled by a linear feedback force. Specifically, we are interested in sampling the possibly multimodal invariant probability distribution of a Langevin…
We develop two notions of time-restricted sensitivity to initial conditions for measurable dynamical systems, where the time before divergence of a pair of paths is at most an asymptotically logarithmic function of a measure of their…