Entanglement theory and the second law of thermodynamics

By Fernando G. S. L. Brandão, Martin Bodo Plenio. 2008

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Entanglement is central both to the foundations of quantum theory and, as a novel resource, to quantum information science. The theory of entanglement establishes basic laws that govern its manipulation, in particular the non-increase of entanglement under local operations on the constituent particles. Such laws aim to draw from them formal analogies to the second law of thermodynamics; however, whereas in the second law the entropy uniquely determines whether a state is adiabatically accessible from another, the manipulation of entanglement under local operations exhibits a fundamental irreversibility, which prevents the existence of such an order. Here, we show that a reversible theory of entanglement and a rigorous relationship with thermodynamics may be established when considering all non-entangling transformations. The role of the entropy in the second law is taken by the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement in the basic law of entanglement. We show the usefulness of this approach to general resource theories and to quantum information theory.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c71356dda76b6a605df3be0f7bd41582adb349b

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

A Generalization of Quantum Stein’s Lemma (2009, methodology): “Another application of our main theorem is given in the companion paper [39] (see also [ 40 ,41]).”
Quantum resource theories (2018, background): “Later, Brandão and Plenio invoked such maps and their asymptotic variant in the study of entanglement reversibliity and its analog to the second law of thermodynamics (Brandão and Plenio, 2008; Brandão and Plenio, 2010).”