The correlation production in thermodynamics

Abstract

Macroscopic many-body systems always exhibit irreversible behaviors together with the entropy increase. However, the underlying microscopic dynamics of the many-body system, either the (quantum) von Neumann or (classical) Liouville equation, guarantees the entropy of an isolated system does not change with time. Notice that, in practical measurements, usually it is the partial information (e.g., marginal distribution, few-body observable expectation) that is directly accessible to our observations, rather than the full ensemble state. But indeed such partial information is sufficient to give most macroscopic thermodynamic quantities, and they exhibits irreversible behaviors. At the same time, there is some correlation entropy hiding in the full ensemble, i.e., the mutual information between different marginal distributions, but difficult to be sensed in practice. We notice that such correlation production is closely related to the macroscopic entropy increase in the standard thermodynamics. In open systems, the irreversible entropy production of the open system can be proved to be equivalent with the correlation production between the open system and its environment. During the free diffusion of an isolated ideal gas, the correlation between the spatial and momentum distributions is increasing monotonically, and it could well reproduce the entropy increase result in the standard thermodynamics. In the presence of particle collisions, the single-particle distribution always approaches the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution as its steady state, and its entropy increase indeed indicates the correlation production between the particles. In all these examples, the total entropy of the whole isolated system keeps constant. In this sense, the macroscopic irreversibility and the reversible microscopic dynamics coincide with each other.