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arXiv:quant-ph/0703027

Are entropic Bell inequalities implied by the second law?

Ian T. Durham

Published Mar 3, 2007• 1 citation
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Abstract

Bell's inequalities, in the form given by Cerf and Adami, are derived from the combination of the second law of thermodynamics and the Markov postulate. Violations of these inequalities are discussed in terms of the mixing characteristics of the density operators. A quantum mechanical bound for a system of three qubits, two of which are entangled, is found and is shown to lead to strong subadditivity in one case. Finally, in interpreting the results, the role the uncertainty relations play in the definition of entropy and the second law is discussed, demonstrating a link to Bell's inequalities. Additionally the second law is shown to be dependent on the type of measurement in quantum systems. Specifically, a more general statement of the second law appropriate to both quantum and classical systems is suggested.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0703027

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Bell's inequalities, in the form given by Cerf and Adami, are derived from the combination of the second law of thermodynamics and the Markov postulate. Violations of these inequalities are discussed in terms of the mixing characteristics of the density operators. A quantum mechanical bound for a system of three qubits, two of which are entangled, is found and is shown to lead to strong subadditivity in one case. Finally, in interpreting the results, the role the uncertainty relations play in the definition of entropy and the second law is discussed, demonstrating a link to Bell's inequalities. Additionally the second law is shown to be dependent on the type of measurement in quantum systems. Specifically, a more general statement of the second law appropriate to both quantum and classical systems is suggested.
We show that the Cerf-Adami inequalities do not necessarily depend on conditional entropies nor any reference to Markov chains. While the latter are not explicit in the original form, they are often implied in certain derivations. We also show that these inequalities are intimately related to at least one interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics. The combination of these results provides added insight into why some quantum systems violate the Cerf-Adami inequalities thereby improving our understanding of the quantum-classical boundary. As a result we suggest that the second law may serve as some type of boundary condition on classical knowledge.
We investigate the fine-grained uncertainty relations for qubit systems by measurements corresponding respectively to two and three spin operators. Then we derive the general bound for a combination of two probabilities of projective measurements in mutually unbiased bases in ddd-dimensional Hilbert space. All of those uncertainty inequalities can be applied to construct different thermodynamic cycles such that the violation of those inequalities will lead to the violation of the second law of thermodynamics. This reveals the relationship between fine-grained uncertainty and the second law of thermodynamics.
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.
The existence of a global causal order between events places constraints on the correlations that parties may share. Such 'causal correlations' have been the focus of recent attention, driven by the realization that some extensions of quantum mechanics may violate so-called causal inequalities. In this paper we study causal correlations from an entropic perspective, and we show how to use this framework to derive entropic causal inequalities. We consider two different ways to derive such inequalities. Firstly, we consider a method based on the causal Bayesian networks describing the causal relations between the parties. In contrast to the Bell-nonlocality scenario, where this method has previously been shown to be ineffective, we show that it leads to several interesting entropic causal inequalities. Secondly, we consider an alternative method based on counterfactual variables that has previously been used to derive entropic Bell inequalities. We compare the inequalities obtained via these two methods and discuss their violation by noncausal correlations. As an application of our approach, we derive bounds on the quantity of information—which is more naturally expressed in the entropic framework—that parties can communicate when operating in a definite causal order.
The probability distribution determining the quantum states of photons and qudits are reviewed. Shannon, Rényi and Tsallis entropies associated with the probability distributions are discussed. Shannon information associated with quantum states in the probability representation is considered. Known inequalities for the classical joint probability distributions determining quantum states of multipartite systems are discussed in detail and the relationship to the inequalities known for quantum von Neumann entropy of the states is presented. Properties of subadditivity and strong subadditivity of the von Neumann entropy of two-partite and multipartite qudit states are considered in view of the subadditivity and strong subadditivity properties of Shannon entropies associated with classical joint probability distributions determining the multiqudit quantum states. The new entropic uncertainty relationships for optical tomograms are suggested as a test for accuracy of the homodyne reconstructing the photon state.