Hidden Dissipation and Irreversibility in Maxwell’s Demon

Maxwell’s demon is an entity in a 150-year-old thought experiment that paradoxically appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics by reducing entropy without doing work. It has increasingly practical implications as advances in nanomachinery produce devices that push the thermodynamic limits imposed by the second law. A well-known explanation claiming that information erasure restores second law compliance fails to resolve the paradox because it assumes the second law a priori, and does not predict irreversibility. Instead, a purely mechanical resolution that does not require information theory is presented. The transport fluxes of mass, momentum, and energy involved in the demon’s operation are analyzed and show that they imply “hidden” external work and dissipation. Computing the dissipation leads to a new lower bound on entropy production by the demon. It is strictly positive in all nontrivial cases, providing a more stringent limit than the second law and implying intrinsic thermodynamic irreversibility. The thermodynamic irreversibility is linked with mechanical irreversibility resulting from the spatial asymmetry of the demon’s speed selection criteria, indicating one mechanism by which macroscopic irreversibility may emerge from microscopic dynamics.     

Formulation of Time-Fractional Electrodynamics Based on Riemann-Silberstein Vector

In this paper, the formulation of time-fractional (TF) electrodynamics is derived based on the Riemann-Silberstein (RS) vector. With the use of this vector and fractional-order derivatives, one can write TF Maxwell’s equations in a compact form, which allows for modelling of energy dissipation and dynamics of electromagnetic systems with memory. Therefore, we formulate TF Maxwell’s equations using the RS vector and analyse their properties from the point of view of classical electrodynamics, i.e., energy and momentum conservation, reciprocity, causality. Afterwards, we derive classical solutions for wave-propagation problems, assuming helical, spherical, and cylindrical symmetries of solutions. The results are supported by numerical simulations and their analysis. Discussion of relations between the TF Schrödinger equation and TF electrodynamics is included as well.     

Quantumness Measures for a System of Two Qubits Interacting with a Field in the Presence of the Time-Dependent Interaction and Kerr Medium

In this work, we introduce the standard Tavis-Cummings model to describe two-qubit system interacting with a single-mode field associated to power-law (PL) potentials. We explore the effect of the time-dependent interaction and the Kerr-like medium. We solve the Schrödinger equation to obtain the density operator that allows us to investigate the dynamical behaviour of some quantumness measures, such as von Neumann entropy, negativity and Mandel’s parameter. We provide how these entanglement measures depend on the system parameters, which paves the way towards better control of entanglement generation in two-qubit systems. We find that the enhancement and preservation of the atoms-field entanglement and atom-atom entanglement can be achieved by a proper choice of the initial parameters of the field in the absence and presence of the time-dependent interaction and Kerr medium. We examine the photons distribution of the field and determine the situations for which the field exhibits super-poissonian, poissonian or sub-poissonian distribution.     

There Is No Spooky Action at a Distance in Quantum Mechanics

Einstein became bothered by quantum mechanical action at a distance within two years of Schrödinger’s introduction of his eponymous wave equation. If the wave function represents the “real” physical state of a particle, then the measurement of the particle’s position would result in the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to the single, measured position. Such a process seemingly violates not only the Schrödinger equation but also special relativity. Einstein was not alone in this vexation; however, the dilemma eventually faded as physicists concentrated on using the Schrödinger equation to solve a plethora of pressing problems. For the next 30 years, wave function collapse, while occasionally discussed by physicists, was primarily a topic of interest for philosophers. That is, until 1964, when Bell introduced his famous inequality and maintained that its violation proved that quantum mechanics and, by implication, nature herself are nonlocal. Unfortunately, this brought the topic back to mainstream physics, where it has remained and continues to muddy the waters. To be sure, not all physicists are bothered by the apparent nonlocality of quantum mechanics. So where have those who embrace quantum nonlocality gone wrong? I argue that the answer is a gratuitous belief in the ontic nature of the quantum state.     

Revisiting Born’s Rule through Uhlhorn’s and Gleason’s Theorems

In a previous article we presented an argument to obtain (or rather infer) Born’s rule, based on a simple set of axioms named “Contexts, Systems and Modalities" (CSM). In this approach, there is no “emergence”, but the structure of quantum mechanics can be attributed to an interplay between the quantized number of modalities that is accessible to a quantum system and the continuum of contexts that are required to define these modalities. The strong link of this derivation with Gleason’s theorem was emphasized, with the argument that CSM provides a physical justification for Gleason’s hypotheses. Here, we extend this result by showing that an essential one among these hypotheses—the need of unitary transforms to relate different contexts—can be removed and is better seen as a necessary consequence of Uhlhorn’s theorem.     

Infinite Ergodic Walks in Finite Connected Undirected Graphs

The micro-canonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles of walks defined in finite connected undirected graphs are considered in the thermodynamic limit of infinite walk length. As infinitely long paths are extremely sensitive to structural irregularities and defects, their properties are used to describe the degree of structural imbalance, anisotropy, and navigability in finite graphs. For the first time, we introduce entropic force and pressure describing the effect of graph defects on mobility patterns associated with the very long walks in finite graphs; navigation in graphs and navigability to the nodes by the different types of ergodic walks; as well as node’s fugacity in the course of prospective network expansion or shrinking.     

Wigner’s Friend Scenarios and the Internal Consistency of Standard Quantum Mechanics

Wigner’s friend scenarios involve an Observer, or Observers, measuring a Friend, or Friends, who themselves make quantum measurements. In recent discussions, it has been suggested that quantum mechanics may not always be able to provide a consistent account of a situation involving two Observers and two Friends. We investigate this problem by invoking the basic rules of quantum mechanics as outlined by Feynman in the well-known “Feynman Lectures on Physics”. We show here that these “Feynman rules” constrain the a priori assumptions which can be made in generalised Wigner’s friend scenarios, because the existence of the probabilities of interest ultimately depends on the availability of physical evidence (material records) of the system’s past. With these constraints obeyed, a non-ambiguous and consistent account of all measurement outcomes is obtained for all agents, taking part in various Wigner’s Friend scenarios.     

Telegraphic Transport Processes and Their Fractional Generalization: A Review and Some Extensions

We address the problem of telegraphic transport in several dimensions. We review the derivation of two and three dimensional telegrapher’s equations—as well as their fractional generalizations—from microscopic random walk models for transport (normal and anomalous). We also present new results on solutions of the higher dimensional fractional equations.     

Asymptotic Normality for Plug-In Estimators of Generalized Shannon’s Entropy

Shannon’s entropy is one of the building blocks of information theory and an essential aspect of Machine Learning (ML) methods (e.g., Random Forests). Yet, it is only finitely defined for distributions with fast decaying tails on a countable alphabet. The unboundedness of Shannon’s entropy over the general class of all distributions on an alphabet prevents its potential utility from being fully realized. To fill the void in the foundation of information theory, Zhang (2020) proposed generalized Shannon’s entropy, which is finitely defined everywhere. The plug-in estimator, adopted in almost all entropy-based ML method packages, is one of the most popular approaches to estimating Shannon’s entropy. The asymptotic distribution for Shannon’s entropy’s plug-in estimator was well studied in the existing literature. This paper studies the asymptotic properties for the plug-in estimator of generalized Shannon’s entropy on countable alphabets. The developed asymptotic properties require no assumptions on the original distribution. The proposed asymptotic properties allow for interval estimation and statistical tests with generalized Shannon’s entropy.     

Generalized Landauer Bound for Information Processing: Proof and Applications

A generalized form of Landauer’s bound on the dissipative cost of classical information processing in quantum-mechanical systems is proved using a new approach. This approach sidesteps some prominent objections to standard proofs of Landauer’s bound—broadly interpreted here as a nonzero lower bound on the amount of energy that is irreversibly transferred from a physical system to its environment for each bit of information that is lost from the system—while establishing a far more general result. Specializations of our generalized Landauer bound for ideal and non-ideal information processing operations, including but not limited to the simplified forms for erasure and logical operations most familiar from the literature, are presented and discussed. These bounds, taken together, enable reconsideration of the links between logical reversibility, physical reversibility, and conditioning of operations in contexts that include but are far more general than the thermodynamic model systems that are most widely invoked in discussions of Landauer’s Principle. Because of the strategy used to prove the generalized bounds and these specializations, this work may help to illuminate and resolve some longstanding controversies related to dissipation in computation.     

Belavkin–Staszewski Relative Entropy,Conditional Entropy,and Mutual Information

Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy can naturally characterize the effects of the possible noncommutativity of quantum states. In this paper, two new conditional entropy terms and four new mutual information terms are first defined by replacing quantum relative entropy with Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy. Next, their basic properties are investigated, especially in classical-quantum settings. In particular, we show the weak concavity of the Belavkin–Staszewski conditional entropy and obtain the chain rule for the Belavkin–Staszewski mutual information. Finally, the subadditivity of the Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy is established, i.e., the Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy of a joint system is less than the sum of that of its corresponding subsystems with the help of some multiplicative and additive factors. Meanwhile, we also provide a certain subadditivity of the geometric Rényi relative entropy.     

A Realization Approach to Lossy Network Compression of a Tuple of Correlated Multivariate Gaussian RVs

Examined in this paper is the Gray and Wyner source coding for a simple network of correlated multivariate Gaussian random variables, Y1:Ω→Rp1 and Y2:Ω→Rp2. The network consists of an encoder that produces two private rates R1 and R2, and a common rate R0, and two decoders, where decoder 1 receives rates (R1,R0) and reproduces Y1 by Y^1, and decoder 2 receives rates (R2,R0) and reproduces Y2 by Y^2, with mean-square error distortions E||Yi−Y^i||Rpi2≤Δi∈[0,∞],i=1,2. Use is made of the weak stochastic realization and the geometric approach of such random variables to derive test channel distributions, which characterize the rates that lie on the Gray and Wyner rate region. Specific new results include: (1) A proof that, among all continuous or finite-valued random variables, W:Ω→W, Wyner’s common information, C(Y1,Y2)=infPY1,Y2,W:PY1,Y2|W=PY1|WPY2|WI(Y1,Y2;W), is achieved by a Gaussian random variable, W:Ω→Rn of minimum dimension n, which makes the two components of the tuple (Y1,Y2) conditionally independent according to the weak stochastic realization of (Y1,Y2), and a the formula where di∈(0,1),i=1,…,n are the canonical correlation coefficients of the correlated parts of Y1 and Y2, and a realization of (Y1,Y2,W) which achieves this. (2) The parameterization of rates that lie on the Gray and Wyner rate region, and several of its subsets. The discussion is largely self-contained and proceeds from first principles, while connections to prior literature is discussed.     

Conditional approach to thermo-superstatistics

A conditional approach is developed for establishing a generalized thermodynamic-like formalism for superstatistical systems. In this framework, the existence of two largely-separated time scales is explicitly taken into account. A generalization of Einstein’s relation for fluctuations is derived based on the restricted conditional maximum-entropy method.      

Distinguishability and Disturbance in the Quantum Key Distribution Protocol Using the Mean Multi-Kings’ Problem

We introduce a quantum key distribution protocol using mean multi-kings’ problem. Using this protocol, a sender can share a bit sequence as a secret key with receivers. We consider a relation between information gain by an eavesdropper and disturbance contained in legitimate users’ information. In BB84 protocol, such relation is known as the so-called information disturbance theorem. We focus on a setting that the sender and two receivers try to share bit sequences and the eavesdropper tries to extract information by interacting legitimate users’ systems and an ancilla system. We derive trade-off inequalities between distinguishability of quantum states corresponding to the bit sequence for the eavesdropper and error probability of the bit sequence shared with the legitimate users. Our inequalities show that eavesdropper’s extracting information regarding the secret keys inevitably induces disturbing the states and increasing the error probability.     

A Refutation of Finite-State Language Models through Zipf’s Law for Factual Knowledge

We present a hypothetical argument against finite-state processes in statistical language modeling that is based on semantics rather than syntax. In this theoretical model, we suppose that the semantic properties of texts in a natural language could be approximately captured by a recently introduced concept of a perigraphic process. Perigraphic processes are a class of stochastic processes that satisfy a Zipf-law accumulation of a subset of factual knowledge, which is time-independent, compressed, and effectively inferrable from the process. We show that the classes of finite-state processes and of perigraphic processes are disjoint, and we present a new simple example of perigraphic processes over a finite alphabet called Oracle processes. The disjointness result makes use of the Hilberg condition, i.e., the almost sure power-law growth of algorithmic mutual information. Using a strongly consistent estimator of the number of hidden states, we show that finite-state processes do not satisfy the Hilberg condition whereas Oracle processes satisfy the Hilberg condition via the data-processing inequality. We discuss the relevance of these mathematical results for theoretical and computational linguistics.     

Frequency,Informativity and Word Length: Insights from Typologically Diverse Corpora

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) is more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study examines a more diverse sample of languages than the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters and in phonemes (for some of the languages), as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show different correlations between word length and the corpus-based measure for different languages. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, by the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions.     

The spontaneous formation of inhomogeneity in a classical one-particle “gas”: An example in silico

A single classical isoergic particle was placed in a cube and allowed to propagate for 100 ns to 10 ms. The interaction of the particle with the inner wall of the cube was modeled as a linear combination of specular and random reflection, the extent of the combination being governed by a user-defined “roughness” parameter α. As a function of α, the particle’s relative pressure and density spontaneously took on an inhomogenous distribution.     

Survival of Virus Particles in Water Droplets: Hydrophobic Forces and Landauer’s Principle

Many small biological objects, such as viruses, survive in a water environment and cannot remain active in dry air without condensation of water vapor. From a physical point of view, these objects belong to the mesoscale, where small thermal fluctuations with the characteristic kinetic energy of k_BT (where k_B is the Boltzmann’s constant and T is the absolute temperature) play a significant role. The self-assembly of viruses, including protein folding and the formation of a protein capsid and lipid bilayer membrane, is controlled by hydrophobic forces (i.e., the repulsing forces between hydrophobic particles and regions of molecules) in a water environment. Hydrophobic forces are entropic, and they are driven by a system’s tendency to attain the maximum disordered state. On the other hand, in information systems, entropic forces are responsible for erasing information, if the energy barrier between two states of a switch is on the order of k_BT, which is referred to as Landauer’s principle. We treated hydrophobic interactions responsible for the self-assembly of viruses as an information-processing mechanism. We further showed a similarity of these submicron-scale processes with the self-assembly in colloidal crystals, droplet clusters, and liquid marbles.     

Entropy and Entropic Forces to Model Biological Fluids

Living cells are complex systems characterized by fluids crowded by hundreds of different elements, including, in particular, a high density of polymers. They are an excellent and challenging laboratory to study exotic emerging physical phenomena, where entropic forces emerge from the organization processes of many-body interactions. The competition between microscopic and entropic forces may generate complex behaviors, such as phase transitions, which living cells may use to accomplish their functions. In the era of big data, where biological information abounds, but general principles and precise understanding of the microscopic interactions is scarce, entropy methods may offer significant information. In this work, we developed a model where a complex thermodynamic equilibrium resulted from the competition between an effective electrostatic short-range interaction and the entropic forces emerging in a fluid crowded by different sized polymers. The target audience for this article are interdisciplinary researchers in complex systems, particularly in thermodynamics and biophysics modeling.     

A Survey of Information Entropy Metrics for Complex Networks

Information entropy metrics have been applied to a wide range of problems that were abstracted as complex networks. This growing body of research is scattered in multiple disciplines, which makes it difficult to identify available metrics and understand the context in which they are applicable. In this work, a narrative literature review of information entropy metrics for complex networks is conducted following the PRISMA guidelines. Existing entropy metrics are classified according to three different criteria: whether the metric provides a property of the graph or a graph component (such as the nodes), the chosen probability distribution, and the types of complex networks to which the metrics are applicable. Consequently, this work identifies the areas in need for further development aiming to guide future research efforts.