We demonstrate that both Wigner's form of Bell's inequalities as well as a form of the second law of thermodynamics, as manifest in Caratheáodory's principle, can be derived from the same simple experimental and statistical mechanical assumptions combinedwith the trivial behavior of integers. This suggests that Bell's theorem is merely a well-disguised statement of the second law. It also suggests that entanglement is necessary for quantum theory to be in full accord with the second law and thus builds on the results of Wiesniak, Vedral, and Brukner [1] who showed it was necessary for consistency with the third law.
Abstract Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has been to establish a true second law of entanglement, and in particular a unique function that governs all transformations between entangled systems, mirroring the role of entropy in thermodynamics. Contrary to previous promising evidence, here we show that this is impossible and that no direct counterpart to the second law of thermodynamics can be established. This is accomplished by demonstrating the irreversibility of entanglement theory from first principles. Assuming only the most general microscopic physical constraints of entanglement manipulation, we show that entanglement theory is irreversible under all non-entangling transformations. We furthermore rule out reversibility without significant entanglement expenditure, showing that reversible entanglement transformations require the generation of macroscopically large amounts of entanglement according to certain measures. Our results not only reveal fundamental differences between quantum entanglement transformations and thermodynamic processes, but also showcase a unique property of entanglement that distinguishes it from other known quantum resources.
We have presented a set of laws of entanglement thermodynamics for
TTˉ-deformed CFTs and in general for
T2-deformed field theories. In particular, the first law of this set, states that although we are dealing with a non-trivial deformed theory, the change of the entanglement entropy is simply translated to the change of the bending energy of the entangling surface. We interpret this energy as the energy of decomposition. Probing the whole spectrum of the deformed theory, a second law also results, which suggests an inequality that the first law is derived from its saturation limit. We explain that this second law guarantees the preservation of the unitarity bound. The thermodynamical form of these laws requires us to define the temperature of deformation and express its characteristics, which is the subject of the third law. We use a holographic approach in this analysis and in each case, we consider the generalization to higher dimensions.