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arXiv:1206.2479 · Physical Review Letters

Fluctuation Theorem with Information Exchange: Role of Correlations in Stochastic Thermodynamics

Takahiro Sagawa, Masahito Ueda

Published Nov 2, 2012• 256 citations
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Abstract

We establish the fluctuation theorem in the presence of information exchange between a nonequilibrium system and other degrees of freedom such as an observer and a feedback controller, where the amount of information exchange is added to the entropy production. The resulting generalized second law sets the fundamental limit of energy dissipation and energy cost during the information exchange. Our results apply not only to feedback-controlled processes but also to a much broader class of information exchanges, and provide a unified framework of nonequilibrium thermodynamics of measurement and feedback control.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.109.180602

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We establish the fluctuation theorem in the presence of information exchange between a nonequilibrium system and other degrees of freedom such as an observer and a feedback controller, where the amount of information exchange is added to the entropy production. The resulting generalized second law sets the fundamental limit of energy dissipation and energy cost during the information exchange. Our results apply not only to feedback-controlled processes but also to a much broader class of information exchanges, and provide a unified framework of nonequilibrium thermodynamics of measurement and feedback control.
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Fluctuation theorems and the second law of thermodynamics are powerful relations constraining the behavior of out-of-equilibrium systems. While there exist generalizations of these relations to feedback controlled quantum systems, their applicability is limited, in particular when considering strong and continuous measurements. In this Letter, we overcome this shortcoming by deriving a novel fluctuation theorem, and the associated second law of information thermodynamics, which remain applicable in arbitrary feedback control scenarios. In our second law, the entropy production is bounded by the coarse-grained entropy production that is inferrable from the measurement outcomes, an experimentally accessible quantity that does not diverge even under strong continuous measurements. We illustrate our results by a qubit undergoing discrete and continuous measurement, where our approach provides a useful bound on the entropy production for all measurement strengths.
We review a general theory of thermodynamics of information processing. The background of this topic is the recently-developed nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and quantum (and classical) information theory. These theories are closely related to the modern technologies to manipulate and observe small systems; for example, macromolecules and colloidal particles in the classical regime, and quantum-optical systems and quantum dots in the quantum regime. First, we review a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics to the situations in which small thermodynamic systems are subject to quantum feedback control. The generalized second law is expressed in terms of an inequality that includes the term of information obtained by the measurement, as well as the thermodynamic quantities such as the free energy. This inequality leads to the fundamental upper bound of the work that can be extracted by a “Maxwell's demon”, which can be regarded as a feedback controller with a memory that stores measurement outcomes. Second, we review generalizations of the second law of thermodynamics to the measurement and information erasure processes of the memory of the demon that is a quantum system. The generalized second laws consist of inequalities that identify the lower bounds of the energy costs that are needed for the measurement and the information erasure. The inequality for the erasure leads to the celebrated Landauer's principle for a special case. Moreover, these inequalities enable us to reconcile Maxwell's demon with the second law of thermodynamics. In these inequalities, thermodynamic quantities and information contents are treated on an equal footing. In fact, the inequalities are model-independent, so that they can be applied to a broad class of information processing. Therefore, these inequalities can be called the second law of “information thermodynamics”.
We derive integral quantum fluctuation theorems and quantum Jarzynski equalities for a feedback-controlled system and a memory which registers outcomes of the measurement. The obtained equalities involve the information content, which reflects the information exchange between the system and the memory, and take into account the back action of a general measurement contrary to the classical case. The generalized second law of thermodynamics under measurement and feedback control is reproduced from these equalities.
We derive a general quantum exchange fluctuation theorem for multipartite systems with arbitrary coupling strengths by taking into account the informational contribution of the back-action of the quantum measurements, which contributes to the increase in the von-Neumann entropy of the quantum system. The resulting second law of thermodynamics is tighter than the conventional Clausius inequality. The derived bound is the quantum mutual information of the conditional thermal state, which is a thermal state conditioned on the initial energy measurement. These results elucidate the role of quantum correlations in the heat exchange between multiple subsystems.
The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a fundamental result in statistical physics that establishes a connection between the response of a system subject to a perturbation and the fluctuations associated with observables in equilibrium. Here we derive its version within a resource-theoretic framework, where one investigates optimal quantum state transitions under thermodynamic constraints. More precisely, we first characterize optimal thermodynamic distillation processes, and then we prove a relation between the amount of free energy dissipated in such processes and the free-energy fluctuations of the initial state of the system. Our results apply to initial states given by either asymptotically many identical pure systems or an arbitrary number of independent energy-incoherent systems, and they allow not only for a state transformation but also for the change of Hamiltonian. The fluctuation-dissipation relations we derive enable us to find the optimal performance of thermodynamic protocols such as work extraction, information erasure, and thermodynamically free communication, up to second-order asymptotics in the number N of processed systems. We thus provide a first rigorous analysis of these thermodynamic protocols for quantum states with coherence between different energy eigenstates in the intermediate regime of large but finite N.