Entropy production as correlation between system and reservoir

By Massimiliano Esposito, K. Lindenberg, C. Van den Broeck. 2009

437 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We derive an exact (classical and quantum) expression for the entropy production of a finite system placed in contact with one or several finite reservoirs, each of which is initially described by a canonical equilibrium distribution. Although the total entropy of system plus reservoirs is conserved, we show that system entropy production is always positive and is a direct measure of system–reservoir correlations and/or entanglements. Using an exactly solvable quantum model, we illustrate our novel interpretation of the Second Law in a microscopically reversible finite-size setting, with strong coupling between the system and the reservoirs. With this model, we also explicitly show the approach of our exact formulation to the standard description of irreversibility in the limit of a large reservoir.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cce3ad13d5e211d25b734273ccac885005fb81a7

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions (2016, background): “Since the initial reservoir state (13) is thermal, the nonnegativity of Σ can be shown by noting the identities [47]”
Information Processing and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: An Inclusive Hamiltonian Approach. (2013, background): “(33) quantifies the degree to which correlations develop between the subsystems, due to their mutual interactions; Esposito et al [16] have explicitly interpreted this build-up of correlations as representing entropy production.”
Thermodynamics of quantum systems under dynamical control (2015, background): “Under typical conditions (such as linear heat transfer) the efficiency at maximum power obeys the so-called Curzon-Ahlborn bound (Chambadal, 1957; Curzon and Ahlborn, 1975; Esposito et al., 2010a; Novikov, 1958; Yvon, 1955) ηCA = 1− √ Tc Th .”
Irreversible entropy production: From classical to quantum (2020, background): “(Esposito et al., 2010).”
The role of quantum information in thermodynamics—a topical review (2015, result): “maybe attributed to the total correlations between the system and the reservoir [216] (we note that this derivation is entirely analogous to the formulation of the Landauer principle put forward by in [115]).”
Quantum Fluctuation Theorems for Arbitrary Environments: Adiabatic and Nonadiabatic Entropy Production (2017, background): “[50], and S(ρE ||ρE) corresponds to the thermodynamic entropy production due to irreversibly reseting the ancilla back to ρE in contact with an equilibrium reservoir at the same temperature.”