Department of Physics, Gakushuin University, 1-5-1 Mejiro, Toshima-ku, 171-0031 Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Physics, Keio university, Hiyoshi 3-14-1, Kohoku-ku, 223-0061 Yokohama, Japan.
Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Sep 13;123(11):110603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.110603.
We establish that entropy production, which is crucial to the characterization of thermodynamic irreversibility, is obtained through a variational principle involving the Kulback-Leibler divergence. A simple application of this representation leads to an information-theoretical bound on entropy production in thermal relaxation processes; this is a stronger inequality than the conventional second law of thermodynamics. This bound is also interpreted as a constraint on the possible path of a thermal relaxation process in terms of information geometry. Our results reveal a hidden universal law inherent to general thermal relaxation processes.
我们证明了，熵产生对于热力学不可逆性的刻画至关重要，可以通过一个涉及 Kulback-Leibler 散度的变分原理来获得。这种表示的一个简单应用导致了热弛豫过程中熵产生的一个信息论界；这是比传统热力学第二定律更强的不等式。这个界也可以解释为信息几何中热弛豫过程可能路径的约束。我们的结果揭示了一般热弛豫过程中固有的一个隐藏的普遍规律。
