Dissipation, interaction and relative entropy
Statistical Mechanics
2015-06-17 v1 Quantum Physics
Abstract
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. Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions both in classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. As an application, the relative entropy is related to transport coefficients.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1309.4727,
title = {Dissipation, interaction and relative entropy},
author = {B. Gaveau and L. Granger and M. Moreau and L. S. Schulman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.4727},
year = {2015}
}