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arXiv · 2101.09156

Thermodynamics of light emission

Antoine Rignon-Bret
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Abstract

Some interactions between classical or quantum fields and matter are known to be irreversible processes. Here we associate an entropy to the electromagnetic field from well-known notions of statistical quantum mechanics, in particular the notion of diagonal entropy. We base our work on the study of spontaneous emission and light diffusion. We obtain a quantity which allows to quantify irreversibility for a quantum and classical description of the electromagnetic field, that we can study and interpret from a thermodynamical point of view.

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Antoine Rignon-Bret. 2021-01-20. Thermodynamics of light emission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09156

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