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Quantum Reports

Epistemic Signatures of Fisher Information in Finite Fermions Systems

Angelo Plastino, Victoria Vampa

Published Oct 14, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Beginning with Mandelbrot’s insight that Fisher information may admit a thermodynamic interpretation, a growing body of work has connected this information-theoretic measure to fluctuation–dissipation relations, thermodynamic geometry, and phase transitions. Yet, these connections have largely remained at the level of formal analogies. In this work, we provide what is, to our knowledge, the first explicit realization of the epistemic-to-physical transition of Fisher information within a finite interacting quantum system. Specifically, we analyze a model of N fermions occupying two degenerate levels and coupled by a spin-flip interaction of strength V, treated in the grand canonical ensemble at inverse temperature β. We compute the Fisher information FN(V) associated with the sensitivity of the thermal state to changes in V, and show that it becomes an observer-independent, experimentally meaningful quantity: it encodes fluctuations, tracks entropy variations, and reveals structural transitions induced by interactions. Our findings thus demonstrate that Fisher information, originally conceived as an inferential and epistemic measure, can operate as a bona fide thermodynamic observable in quantum many-body physics, bridging the gap between information-theoretic foundations and measurable physical law.

DOI
10.3390/quantum7040048

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Beginning with Mandelbrot’s insight that Fisher information may admit a thermodynamic interpretation, a growing body of work has connected this information-theoretic measure to fluctuation–dissipation relations, thermodynamic geometry, and phase transitions. Yet, these connections have largely remained at the level of formal analogies. In this work, we provide what is, to our knowledge, the first explicit realization of the epistemic-to-physical transition of Fisher information within a finite interacting quantum system. Specifically, we analyze a model of N fermions occupying two degenerate levels and coupled by a spin-flip interaction of strength V, treated in the grand canonical ensemble at inverse temperature β. We compute the Fisher information FN(V) associated with the sensitivity of the thermal state to changes in V, and show that it becomes an observer-independent, experimentally meaningful quantity: it encodes fluctuations, tracks entropy variations, and reveals structural transitions induced by interactions. Our findings thus demonstrate that Fisher information, originally conceived as an inferential and epistemic measure, can operate as a bona fide thermodynamic observable in quantum many-body physics, bridging the gap between information-theoretic foundations and measurable physical law.
We derive the quantum Fisher information for entropy estimation in a Gibbs state and show that it equals the inverse of the heat capacity, which is dual to the temperature Fisher information given by the heat capacity divided by the square of the temperature. Their product is independent of the Hamiltonian and depends only on the temperature, leading to a metrological uncertainty relation between the variances of entropy and temperature estimators in which all system-specific quantities cancel. This relation arises from the dually-flat structure of the Gibbs exponential family expressed in thermodynamic coordinates, and holds for all standard thermodynamically conjugate pairs. We identify energy measurement as the optimal protocol for entropy estimation, analyse critical-point scaling where the entropy Fisher information vanishes, and connect it to the Ruppeiner metric in entropy coordinates. We lastly examine the distinguished role of the von Neumann entropy within the Rényi family. Generalisations to the grand canonical and generalised Gibbs ensembles are given.
We investigate fundamental connections between thermodynamics and quantum information theory. First, we show that the operational framework of thermal operations is nonequivalent to the framework of Gibbs-preserving maps, and we comment on this gap. We then introduce a fully information-theoretic framework generalizing the above by making further abstraction of physical quantities such as energy. It is technically convenient to work with and reproduces known results for finite-size quantum thermodynamics. With our framework we may determine the minimal work cost of implementing any logical process. In the case of information processing on memory registers with a degenerate Hamiltonian, the answer is given by the max-entropy, a measure of information known from quantum information theory. In the general case, we obtain a new information measure, the "coherent relative entropy", which generalizes both the conditional entropy and the relative entropy. It satisfies a collection of properties which justifies its interpretation as an entropy measure and which connects it to known quantities. We then present how, from our framework, macroscopic thermodynamics emerges by typicality, after singling out an appropriate class of thermodynamic states possessing some suitable reversibility property. A natural thermodynamic potential emerges, dictating possible state transformations, and whose differential describes the physics of the system. The textbook thermodynamics of a gas is recovered as well as the form of the second law relating thermodynamic entropy and heat exchange. Finally, noting that quantum states are relative to the observer, we see that the procedure above gives rise to a natural form of coarse-graining in quantum mechanics: Each observer can consistently apply the formalism of quantum information according to their own fundamental unit of information.
This paper presents a formal framework framing quantum decoherence as an information-theoretic phase transition at the quantum-to-classical boundary. We demonstrate that environment-induced superselection (einselection) can be characterized as a true dynamical phase transition where the system-environment coupling strength acts as a thermodynamic control parameter, and the suppression of off-diagonal density matrix elements functions as an order parameter analogous to magnetization in the Ising model. Using quantum mutual information, von Neumann entropy, and entanglement entropy, we track the operational flow of information from a quantum system into environmental degrees of freedom, demonstrating how a singular classical reality emerges via the redundant copying of pointer states into environmental fragments—a process governed by Quantum Darwinism. We analyze a simulated spin-boson model and random unitary circuits with tunable dissipation, extracting clear signatures of criticality including power-law scaling and diverging correlation times at a critical threshold . Crucially, we connect this behavior to recent advancements (2023–2025) in mixed-state topological order, establishing that decoherence-induced transitions map onto anyon condensation transitions within an errorfield double formulation. Finally, we explore the foundational implications of this framework: it sharpens the measurement problem via informational symmetry breaking, reframes observation as a high-decoherence thermodynamic limit, and introduces a Gödelian perspective by demonstrating that determining the critical threshold for arbitrary many-body environments is formally undecidable due to the non-computability of the spectral gap in the thermodynamic limit.
We investigate the dynamical quantum Fisher information of a two-level system coupled to a bosonic environment, focusing on the estimation of the qubit gap. We combine analytical calculations with numerically controlled matrix-product-state simulations. In the exactly solvable pure-dephasing Ohmic regime at zero temperature, the long-time quantum Fisher information displays a coupling-dependent algebraic behavior, leading to a dynamical crossover: it grows without bound at weak coupling, approaches a finite asymptotic value at the crossover coupling, and vanishes at strong coupling. At finite temperature, thermal fluctuations suppress the long-time growth and generate a finite-time maximum, whose dependence on the dephasing coupling retains a clear signa- ture of the zero-temperature crossover. We show that this crossover is absent at zero temperature in non-Ohmic baths: the long-time quantum Fisher information vanishes in the sub-Ohmic and diverges in the super-Ohmic regimes. At non-zero temperature instead, the crossover appears for a super-Ohmic quadratic bath and the crossover coupling becomes temperature-dependent. Moreover, in the zero-temperature Ohmic regime, we introduce an additional amplitude-damping system-bath coupling that induces energy relaxation. This relaxation channel replaces the unbounded long-time growth with a finite asymptotic quantum Fisher information associated with the reduced interacting ground state, while a signature of the pure-dephasing crossover persists in the early-time dynamics. These results establish a direct connection between the low-frequency structure of the bath and the asymptotic metrological behavior of dynamical gap sensing, and show how thermal fluctuations and energy relaxation regularize the ideal pure-dephasing dynamical crossover of the quantum Fisher information.
We establish a connection among (i) the so-called Wehrl entropy, (ii) Fisher's information measure I(beta), and (iii) the canonical ensemble entropy for the one-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator (HO). We show that the contribution of the excited HO spectrum to the mean thermal energy is given by I(beta), while the pertinent canonical partition function is essentially given by another Fisher measure: the so-called shift invariant one. Our findings should be of interest in view of the fact that it has been shown that the Legendre transform structure of thermodynamics can be replicated without any change if one replaces the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy by Fisher's information measure [Phys. Rev. E 60, 48 (1999)]]. Fisher-related uncertainty relations are also advanced, together with a Fisher version of thermodynamics' third law.
Energy and information are fundamental concepts that play crucial roles in the foundations of science, each contributing to different aspects of our understanding of the natural world. Here we encounter that Fisher' measure is able to link them. We also investigate some interesting relations between Fisher's information, Poisson's distribution, and thermal quantifiers in a grand canonical ensemble. These connections permit one to visualize interesting novel artifacts in statistical mechanics. We clearly see them emerge in discussing the ideal gas. For example, we encounter that the Poisson distribution is intrinsically involved in the physics of the ideal gas, and we are able to give a Fisher-estimation of the difference in informational content between the grand canonical and canonical ensembles.