Conditional entropy production and quantum fluctuation theorem of dissipative information: Theory and experiments

Abstract

We study quantum conditional entropy production, which quantifies the irreversibility of system-environment evolution from the perspective of a third system, called the reference. The reference is initially correlated with the system. We show that the quantum unconditional entropy production with respect to the system is less than the conditional entropy production with respect to the reference, where the latter includes a reference-induced dissipative information. The dissipative information pinpoints the distributive correlation established between the environment and the reference, even though they do not interact directly. When reaching the thermal equilibrium, the system-environment evolution has a zero unconditional entropy production. However, one can still have a nonzero conditional entropy production with respect to the reference, which characterizes the informational nonequilibrium of the system-environment evolution in the view point of the reference. The additional contribution to the conditional entropy production, the dissipative information, characterizes a minimal thermodynamic cost that the system pays for maintaining the correlation with the reference. Positive dissipative information also characterizes potential work waste. We prove that both types of entropy production and the dissipative information follow quantum fluctuation theorems when a two-point measurement is applied. We verify the quantum fluctuation theorem for the dissipative information experimentally on IBM quantum computers. We also present examples based on the qubit collisional model and demonstrate universal nonzero dissipative information in the qubit Maxwell's demon protocol.