In a transition between nonequilibrium steady states, the entropic cost associated with the maintenance of steady-state currents can be distinguished from that arising from the transition itself through the concepts of excess (housekeeping) entropy flux and adiabatic (nonadiabatic) entropy production. The thermodynamics of this transition is embodied by the Hatano-Sasa relation. In this letter, we show that for a slow transition between quantum nonequilibrium steady states the nonadiabatic entropy production is, to leading order, given by the path action with respect to a Riemannian metric in the parameter space, which can be connected to the Kubo-Mori-Bogoliubov quantum Fisher information. We then demonstrate how to obtain minimally dissipative paths by solving the associated geodesic equation and illustrate the procedure with a simple example of a three-level maser. Furthermore, by identifying the quantum Fisher information with respect to time as a metric in state space, we derive an upper bound on the excess entropy flux that holds for arbitrarily fast processes.
The importance of Fisher information is increasing in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, as it has played a fundamental role in trade-off relations such as thermodynamic uncertainty relations and speed limits. In this work, we investigate temporal Fisher information, which measures the temporal information content encoded in probability distributions, for both classical and quantum systems. We establish that temporal Fisher information is bounded from above by physical costs, such as entropy production in classical Langevin and Markov processes, and the quantum entropy production and the expectation of the effective interaction Hamiltonian in open quantum systems. Conversely, temporal Fisher information is bounded from below by statistical distances (e.g., the Bhattacharyya arccos distance), leading to classical and quantum speed limits that constrain the minimal time required for state transformations. We perform numerical simulations on two quantum dot models to validate the obtained bounds. Our work provides a unified perspective on speed limits from the point of view of temporal Fisher information in both classical and quantum dynamics.
Observer-information entropy production quantifies the loss of recoverable information about a physical source when an already formed observation undergoes source-independent irreversible degradation. The statistical second-law statement
Σobs[s,t]=I(X;Rs)−I(X;Rt)=I(X;Rs∣Rt)≥0 follows from data processing, but by itself it does not identify a physical energetic or thermodynamic cost. This paper establishes such a connection within an explicit and deliberately restricted stochastic-thermodynamic regime. We consider a finite observer memory
Rt coupled to a single heat bath at temperature
T. A source label
X is fixed during the passive relaxation, the transition generator of
Rt is independent of
X, and the memory dynamics satisfies detailed balance with respect to a strictly positive equilibrium law
q. For the joint source--memory ensemble and for the unconditioned memory marginal, we define the standard stochastic-thermodynamic entropy-production rates. Using the relative-entropy chain rule and the detailed-balance
H-theorem, we prove the exact correlation-dissipation decomposition
kBS˙totXR=σobs+kBS˙totR. Consequently,
S˙totXR≥kBσobs,ΔStotXR[s,t]≥kBΣobs[s,t]. At fixed temperature the same result is an excess-free-energy dissipation bound, \[ \Fex_{XR}(s)-\Fex_{XR}(t) \ge k_BT\Sigma_{\mathrm{obs}}[s,t]. \] Equality holds when the memory marginal remains at equilibrium, in which case all thermodynamic irreversibility is attributable to the destruction of source--record correlation. A symmetric two-state memory provides an exactly solvable saturation example. The result is not a universal Landauer principle. It constrains total entropy production and loss of nonequilibrium free energy during passive decorrelation; it does not assert a universal heat or work cost for arbitrary information loss. Driven memories, source-dependent transition rates, active measurement, feedback, multiple reservoirs, and nonequilibrium steady states require the broader information-thermodynamic bookkeeping developed in stochastic thermodynamics. We then place the thermodynamic result beside two Fisher--Shannon bridges. Under Gaussian observation heat flow
Yt=X+Bt, observer-information dissipation obeys the exact identity
σobs(t)=21(td−J(Yt))=2t21mmse(X∣Yt), while pairwise statistical distinguishability obeys \[ \frac{d}{dt}\KL(p_t\|q_t) =-\frac12\Jrel(p_t\|q_t). \] Recent temporal-Fisher speed-limit results provide a complementary route from physical entropy production to the speed of probability evolution. Together these results separate three objects that are often conflated: thermodynamic irreversibility, Shannon information loss about the physical source, and Fisher-geometric statistical motion. The paper thereby supplies a physical-cost layer for observer information theory without identifying information with energy or thermodynamic entropy.