Are the laws of entanglement theory thermodynamical?

In recent years it was recognized that properties of physical systems such as entanglement, athermality, and asymmetry, can be viewed as resources for important tasks in quantum information, thermodynamics, and other areas of physics. This recognition followed by the development of specific quantum resource theories (QRTs), such as entanglement theory, determining how quantum states that cannot be prepared under certain restrictions may be manipulated and used to circumvent t...

We consider an alternative approach to the foundations of statistical mechanics, in which subjective randomness, ensemble-averaging or time-averaging are not required. Instead, the universe (i.e. the system together with a sufficiently large environment) is in a quantum pure state subject to a global constraint, and thermalisation results from entanglement between system and environment. We formulate and prove a "General Canonical Principle", which states that the system will...

Resource theories are a generic approach used to manage any valuable resource, such as entanglement, purity, and asymmetry. Such frameworks are characterized by two main elements: a set of predefined (free) operations and states, that one assumes to be easily obtained at no cost. Given these ground rules, one can ask: what is achievable by using such free operations and states? This usually results in a set of state transition conditions, that tell us if a particular state $ ...

Entanglement entropy is often speculated as a strong candidate for the origin of the black-hole entropy. To judge whether this speculation is true or not, it is effective to investigate the whole structure of thermodynamics obtained from the entanglement entropy, rather than just to examine the apparent structure of the entropy alone or to compare it with that of the black hole entropy. It is because entropy acquires a physical significance only when it is related to the ener...

We provide some new properties of entanglement of formation. In particular, we obtain an additive lower bound for entanglement of formation. Subsequently we develop the concept of local orthogonality of ensembles which leads to the mixed states with distillable entanglement equal to entanglement of formation. Then we consider thermodynamical analogies within the entanglement processing domain. Especially, we exploit analogy entanglement -- energy. In this scheme the total ent...

It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For example, we might ask how much work can be obtained by thermalizing $\rho$ to a thermal state $\sigma$ at temperature $T$ of an ambient heat bath. Here, we show that, for different sets of resource-theoretic thermodynamic operations, the amou...

These notes grew from a series of lectures given by the authors during the last decade. They will be published in the proceedings of TASI 2021. After a brief introduction to quantum information theory tools, they are organized in four chapters covering the following subjects: Entanglement in quantum field theory, Irreversibility theorems, Energy-entropy bounds, Entanglement and symmetries.

Several recent results on thermodynamics have been obtained using the tools of quantum information theory and resource theories. So far, the resource theories utilised to describe thermodynamics have assumed the existence of an infinite thermal reservoir, by declaring that thermal states at some background temperature come for free. Here, we propose a resource theory of quantum thermodynamics without a background temperature, so that no states at all come for free. We apply t...

We define and analyse the concept of entanglement production during the evolution of a general quantum mechanical dissipative system. While it is important to minimise entropy production in order to achieve thermodynamical efficiency, maximising the rate of change of entanglement is important in quantum information processing. Quantitative relations are obtained between entropy and entanglement productions, under specific assumptions detailed in the text. We apply these to th...

We review recent work on the foundations of thermodynamics in the light of quantum information theory. We adopt a resource-theoretic perspective, wherein thermodynamics is formulated as a theory of what agents can achieve under a particular restriction, namely, that the only state preparations and transformations that they can implement for free are those that are thermal at some fixed temperature. States that are out of thermal equilibrium are the resources. We consider the ...