Related papers: What Is a Macrostate? Subjective Observations and …

The steady states of dynamical processes can exhibit stable nontrivial phases, which can also serve as fault-tolerant classical or quantum memories. For Markovian quantum (classical) dynamics, these steady states are extremal eigenvectors…

Machine learning methods have proved to be useful for the recognition of patterns in statistical data. The measurement outcomes are intrinsically random in quantum physics, however, they do have a pattern when the measurements are performed…

We present general and rigorous results showing that the microcanonical and canonical ensembles are equivalent at all three levels of description considered in statistical mechanics - namely, thermodynamics, equilibrium macrostates, and…

Levitodynamics, i.e., the levitation of objects of mesoscopic size has made huge progress in the last decade, giving rise to new experimental opportunities for instance in materials science, but also allowing to address questions of…

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…

When describing the effective dynamics of an observable in a many-body system, the repeated randomness assumption, which states that the system returns in a short time to a maximum entropy state, is a crucial hypothesis to guarantee that…

Estimating the free energy, as well as other thermodynamic observables, is a key task in lattice field theories. Recently, it has been pointed out that deep generative models can be used in this context [1]. Crucially, these models allow…

We study the emergence of typicality in classical systems with a large number of binary state variables. We show analytically that for sufficiently large subsets of the complete state space, state functions which can be associated with…

The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational characteristics of dynamical physical systems has been a major theoretical interest since at least the 19th century, and has been of increasing practical importance as the…

Markovian master equations provide a versatile tool for describing open quantum systems when memory effects of the environment may be neglected. As these equations are of an approximate nature, they often do not respect the laws of…

This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…

Stochastic Thermodynamics (ST) extends the notions of classical thermodynamics to trajectories taken from a nonequilibrium ensemble. This extension yields a simple approach to fluctuation relations in small systems. Multiple time- and…

To understand the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility from microscopic reversible dynamics, the idea of coarse-graining plays a fundamental role. In this work, we develop a unified inferential framework for macroscopic states, that is,…

A definition of metastable states applicable to arbitrary finite state Markov processes satisfying detailed balance is discussed. In particular, we identify a crucial condition that distinguishes genuine metastable states from other types…

We consider the general problem of determining the steady state of stochastic nonequilibrium systems such as those that have been used to model (among other things) biological transport and traffic flow. We begin with a broad overview of…

For the voter model, we study the effect of a memory-dependent transition rate. We assume that the transition of a spin into the opposite state decreases with the time it has been in its current state. Counter-intuitively, we find that the…

Descriptions of molecular systems usually refer to two distinct theoretical frameworks. On the one hand the quantum pure state, i.e. the wavefunction, of an isolated system which is determined to calculate molecular properties and to…

We study the optimization of the expected long-term reward in finite partially observable Markov decision processes over the set of stationary stochastic policies. In the case of deterministic observations, also known as state aggregation,…

A small quantum scattering system (the microsystem) is studied in interaction with a large system (the macrosystem) described by unknown stochastic variables. The interaction between the two systems is diagonal for the microsystem in a…

We introduce an approach to inferring the causal architecture of stochastic dynamical systems that extends rate distortion theory to use causal shielding---a natural principle of learning. We study two distinct cases of causal inference:…