Entropy, majorization and thermodynamics in general probabilistic theories

Abstract

In this note we lay some groundwork for the resource theory of thermodynamics in general probabilistic theories (GPTs). We consider theories satisfying a purely convex abstraction of the spectral decomposition of density matrices: that every state has a decomposition, with unique probabilities, into perfectly distinguishable pure states. The spectral entropy, and analogues using other Schur-concave functions, can be defined as the entropy of these probabilities. We describe additional conditions under which the outcome probabilities of a fine-grained measurement are majorized by those for a spectral measurement, and therefore the "spectral entropy" is the measurement entropy (and therefore concave). These conditions are (1) projectivity, which abstracts aspects of the Lueders-von Neumann projection postulate in quantum theory, in particular that every face of the state space is the positive part of the image of a certain kind of projection operator called a filter; and (2) symmetry of transition probabilities. The conjunction of these, as shown earlier by Araki, is equivalent to a strong geometric property of the unnormalized state cone known as perfection: that there is an inner product according to which every face of the cone, including the cone itself, is self-dual. Using some assumptions about the thermodynamic cost of certain processes that are partially motivated by our postulates, especially projectivity, we extend von Neumann's argument that the thermodynamic entropy of a quantum system is its spectral entropy to generalized probabilistic systems satisfying spectrality.