Microcanonical thermodynamics in general physical theories

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:18040091,
            doi = {10.48660/18040091},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/18040091},
            author = {Scandolo, Carlo Maria},
            keywords = {},
            language = {en},
            title = {Microcanonical thermodynamics in general physical theories},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2018},
            month = {apr},
            note = {PIRSA:18040091 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
          

Abstract

Microcanonical thermodynamics studies the operations that can be performed on systems with well-defined energy. So far, this approach has been applied to classical and quantum systems. Here we extend it to arbitrary physical theories, proposing two requirements for the development of a general microcanonical framework. We then formulate three resource theories, corresponding to three different choices of basic operations. We focus on a class of physical theories, called sharp theories with purification, where these three sets of operations exhibit remarkable properties. In these theories, a necessary condition for thermodynamic transitions is given by a suitable majorisation criterion. This becomes a sufficient condition in all three resource theories if and only if the dynamics allowed by the theory satisfy a condition that we call "unrestricted reversibility". Under this condition, we derive a duality between the resource theory of microcanonical thermodynamics and the resource theory of pure bipartite entanglement.